00:01 I have to write about today, December 31st, 2012. A pivotal day, like all December 31sts, made for 11:59 and all its embraces. What could possibly be out of the ordinary on a day that’s really no more than a countdown? The sound of fireworks seeps through my apartment window. I guess they’re getting ready for tonight. Cat, freaked out, seeks refuge under the bed.

03:12 A glass of water and a mouthful of medicine: for healing my appendicitis scar, for herpes, for allergies. A year of poor health, this goddamn year. I’m a vegetarian, I don’t smoke or eat fried food, I only drink beer (lots, but only beer), I mean, I, who am so hardly a glutton, end the year by swallowing a pharmacy.

04:24 I hear the morning’s first birds. In my insomnia I read Claudio Bertoni’s diaries. “I’m already getting sick of taking out this little notebook here and there to scribble nonsense,” he writes. And later on: “It wasn’t just one sleepless crazy bird singing out there / There are several and in several windows.” I get vertigo whenever that happens. When what I read seems like a picture of the moment of its reading.

07:49 Cat wakes me up, I open the window for him. It occurs to me that he’s going to hunt the morning birds that we heard a little while ago.
12:26 I have to make a salad for the party tonight. I have to write about today. I have to buy beer and vegetables. I have to charge my camera battery. I have to answer that email about whether I have ever been embarrassed to be seen reading “a good book, but with a complicated title.” I have to take medicine for my scar, for herpes, for allergies. But instead of doing everything I have to do, I sink into Twitter and write some nonsense.

3:05 I buy lettuce, tomato, cheese, corn, and two packs of beer. Yellow panties are on sale all over the neighborhood. “Wear a pair for good luck, caserita,” says one vendor. I buy it. It will be my first New Year’s in yellow panties. My first year without my appendix. The first time my secret wish is health-related.

6:34 Salad ready, battery charged, medicine taken. Now I have to write about today. But nothing occurs to me. There are probably birds in the windows of my head. I mentally write out my answer about good books with complicated titles: It wasn’t embarrassment per se, but rather a feeling of false empathy that I once had in the waiting room outside a doctor’s office with the secretary. She was reading Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, very intently. But once in a while she’d look up from her book and I felt her eyes lock onto mine: Self-Help, by Lorrie Moore. I wanted to say, “It’s not what you think,” but instead I just smiled at her with an involuntary complicity and kept reading until the doctor interrupted us.

10:15 Cat has come out of his hiding spot. The poor thing, he doesn’t realize that the fireworks are going to start going off any second. It pains me to leave him alone, but I can’t take him with me to the house where we’re ringing in the new year. In the taxi I realize I left the beer in the freezer. I think it’s the most extraordinary thing that’s happened to me all day, the most unusual, and so I ought to write about it. About the implausible will of negligence.

11:40 We’re nine adults, seven kids, and a calico cat. I’m the only one wearing yellow underwear. Four or five years ago, there were no children among us. Now there’s one here I don’t know. He’s nine and he wants to start hugging everyone already. I ask him his name. “I’m Santiago, but I’d like to be called Miguel,” he says. It can’t be because of Miguel Enríquez, I suppose. I ask if he knows someone by that name. Someone who he looks up to. “No,” he answers, confident. But a little while later he mentions Miguelito, the character in Mafalda, his favorite comic book.

11:55 Our hostess is now wearing a tiara that says Happy New Year and switches on the radio. There’s a guitar, a bongo, a piano, some vocals: everything’s set to welcome this 2013 that’s now rapidly approaching. Everyone gets into their hugging positions. I suddenly remember that my camera’s in my wallet. Where’s my wallet? I have to take a photo of the day before it’s over, I think. I can’t find my damn wallet. I have five seconds to find it, four, three, two, one. Click.




See also:
[Yuri Herrera] [Oliverio Coelho]