New

You wake and your eyes adjust to the sun shining in the window. You draw a breath and the air is as fresh as you can remember, and you wonder if the air is different than it was yesterday: you wonder if, while you slept, new air rolled down from the mountains and pushed the old air out to sea.

A clock ticking is the only sign that time is moving at all.

You step out of bed and you go to the kitchen. It looks different, like someone brightened the paint, like the ceilings are a few inches higher, and you wonder if this isn't your house at all. But it is your house. It is, but it changed while you were sleeping. It cleaned itself up, started over, reset; and so many of the traces of the life you were busy having in it, before—they've been carried away like the litter of last night's party.

It's a new year.

You sit down at your table, squinting at the brightness of the unstained tablecloth, a quickening in your heart: a fresh start. Your hands hover over the table without touching, and they're shaking with fear and you can't quite breathe, because how long will it be before you spill something, stain something, and everything that's new feels old again, and this all becomes another gift you've squandered?—so you hold your hands over the table without touching and you try to enjoy this, this freshness in this time between times, this opportunity between opportunities, this new air.