Eat, Pray, Love

tiring. All of us are swaying like kelp in the dark sea current of night. The children around me
are wrapped in silks, like gifts.
I’m so tired, but I don’t drop my little blue string of song, and I drift into such a state that I
think I might be calling God’s name in my sleep, or maybe I am only falling down the well
shaft of this universe. By 11:30, though, the orchestra has picked up the tempo of the chant
and kicked it up into sheer joy. Beautifully dressed women in jingly bracelets are clapping and
dancing and attempting to tambourine with their whole bodies. The drums are slamming,
rhythmic, exciting. As the minutes pass, it feels to me like we are collectively pulling the year
2004 toward us. Like we have roped it with our music, and now we are hauling it across the
night sky like it’s a massive fishing net, brimming with all our unknown destinies. And what a
heavy net it is, indeed, carrying as it does all the births, deaths, tragedies, wars, love stories,
inventions, transformations and calamities that are destined for all of us this coming year. We
keep singing and we keep hauling, hand-over-hand, minute-by-minute, voice after voice,
closer and closer. The seconds drop down to midnight and we sing with our biggest effort yet
and in this last brave exertion we finally pull the net of the New Year over us, covering both
the sky and ourselves with it. God only knows what the year might contain, but now it is here,
and we are all beneath it.
This is the first New Year’s Eve I can ever remember in my life where I haven’t known any
of the people I was celebrating with. In all this dancing and singing, there is nobody for me to
embrace at midnight. But I wouldn’t say that anything about this night has been lonely.
No, I would definitely not say that.
Eat, Pray, Love