The New Years Eve That Changed My Life

“To the things we cannot have,” Frazier toasted.

“I'm not supposed to have you,” I had told him earlier. “You’re Pippin’s best friend. This isn’t supposed to be happening.”

“I know,” he told me. “But it is.”

Pippin defining ultra thirties chic; Jon personifying the ultimate eighties pop icon, down to his greasy spiked hair; Randall appearing as no one but himself, a drunk sailor, half-undressed; Chandra playing swinging hipster in basic black; Frazier, strangely misplaced in Pippin’s extra dress clothes, fitting him physically and yet not fitting him personally; and me, play-acting as Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, down to my rhinestone studded ears and arms masked in long, pale pink gloves.

“To the things we cannot have,” I repeated to the circle of friends, though my eyes met Frazier’s alone. Glasses rang like bells, chiming from one to another, thirty-six individual toasts ringing in sequence like music.

Prince, or The Artist Formally Known As, wailed at us from the living room. “…tonight we’re gonna party like it’s nineteen-ninety-nine…” Another year was preparing to close upon us, bringing us only three hundred and sixty-five days from the turn of the millennium, to the impending Y2K disaster, to the year so many false prophets have labeled as the end of the world.

According to the Mayan calendar, Earth as we know it will cease to exist on December 12, 2014. So far they’ve only been off on one prediction, that of an eclipse. They missed it by thirty-two seconds.

And my world as I knew it was preparing to shift in enormous proportions. That night changed my entire life. It was the night Pippin gave up on loving me.