January Usually Prompts Self Reflection, but is it Really a New Year, New You?

Every month has a mood, a feeling, some combination of memories, moments and nostalgia. You know it—you feel it—even if you’ve never really thought about it. To help encapsulate the moods of the months, we’re asking novelists to take on the calendar and evoke the feelings of each season through fiction, memoir or prose. Here, Alison Pick, author of last summer’s Strangers with the Same Dream, describes the self-doubt and self-reflection associated with the new beginning that January brings. New Year, new you?

The Mood: January

The first morning of the year. Ghostly traces of coke on the glass coffee table. January ahead, brutally cold and hard. Someone had rented the penthouse at Madrigans all the surfaces flat and shiny. I stood and smoked in front of the wall of windows. Twenty stories down the rows of grimy cars with their red taillights blinking like broken Christmas lights. The city wasn’t waking up—it hadn’t really slept.

Once, in another life, the New Year had felt pristine, unsullied, a field of unbroken snow.

My pupils were still big; I blinked and wiped my nose with the back of my bare arm. I thought about the tiny teeth on the serrated edge of a razor blade.

Somewhere behind me Cam came out of the bedroom. He hoarked into the stainless steel sink. The splat of saliva. He stood behind me in his underwear with his chin on my shoulder. The hot flat expanse of his bare chest. I felt his cock stir.

“Babe,” he said.

I held my palm open like I wanted to hold his hand but he passed me my smokes. I tapped the box and drew one out and let it hang from my pouty lower lip. He felt around on the glass coffee table and passed the Mickey Mouse lighter. The smoke rasped my lungs. There was a cough from the bedroom. A leg sticking out from behind the leather sofa. Drew’s friend. Mackenzie? Makayla?

The spaghetti strap of my negligee slipped off my shoulder and Cam pulled it back up with his teeth. Every cell on my bare arm felt alive, tingling, a kind of pleasure that could quickly turn to pain. At the base of my skull the beginning of a massive headache twined its fingers through my hair.

I was a fucking college graduate. What was I doing with my life?

There was a bit of chipped black polish on my nails from a manicure that must have been two months ago.

Hot air blew in from the hotel vents, the kind of stale recycled air that made you long for outside, so fresh and inviting. But when you hit the street the cold slapped you instead. People went around with their eyelids frozen to their face. Twenty stories down I imagined the sound of the doorman’s shovel scraping across the icy sidewalk. I crushed out my cigarette in the cut glass ashtray, went into the bathroom and threw up into the tub. The vomit smelled like vodka and orange juice. I ran the water to wash it away. I didn’t care about resolutions. But my life needed some kind of plot.

“Babe?” I heard Cam call.

I leaned around the doorframe and saw him in his black boxers, crouched by the coffee table. The blow in neat lines like newly shovelled furrows of snow.

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