Brass.

I see a concert on New Year’s Eve. A brass band. An organ. A church, 200 years old.

We sing “God Bless America”.

We sing “America the Beautiful”.

We sing “The Star-Spangled Banner”.

They play a song to commemorate the reopening of Notre Dame. Construction begun in 1163, our conductor reminds us. (Majorly) completed almost 200 years later. Destroyed. Rebuilt. Destroyed. Rebuilt. Destroyed. Rebuilt…

The song depicts soldiers, he tells us. The song depicts prayer. (Prayer to, or prayer from the fallen, he can’t say. A call and response. A conversation. A communion, spoken through the trumpets and the pipe organ.)

The composition is beautiful. It makes one of the trumpeters cry softly from his seat.

They play “Auld Lang Syne”. We forget what it means and look it up. (Old time since.) We will forget again between now and next year.

They play the “Radetzky March”. (Composed in 1848. First U.S. performance in 1929. Our conductor makes a note for the band and the audience to remember that for 2029.) We clap in unison, helping them along to the beat when he encourages us to. We drown them out, and we see that it’s only air through metal, this sound. Ghost music.

We force ourselves to stay up with bad wine and worse TV. We force ourselves off the couch when the fireworks go, when the ball drops (“It just disappears? That’s stupid,” my friend says, wishing they let the whole thing shatter in the middle of Times Square instead).

We congratulate each other on making it.

On staying awake.

On being alive.

On choosing to spend the last moments of the year with us.

Not necessarily in that order.

We go to bed.

__________

I wake up to three messages.

__________

A rogue “Happy New Year”, sent at 12:30am. Waiting to make sure 2025 stuck, maybe, before he committed to it.

__________

A text from a war-torn boy I’ve been talking to across the ocean. I haven’t heard from him in a while. I keep asking if he and his family are okay. I keep sending him reminders that I exist even though it doesn’t really seem to matter in the right way.

He’s finally responded: “Have you found a family who wants me?”

A mistranslation, maybe. Or maybe not.

I share his GoFundMe again.

__________

An Instagram post out of Gaza. Only 4 hours ago.  4am here. 11am there. Halfway through the first day. But time doesn’t work like that there, I remind myself. It doesn’t really work that way here, either, but everything is relative, I guess.

Did these children stay up until midnight? Did they make it? Did they see the new year?

By dawn’s early light?

“It was the first night of the new year in Gaza,” is all the caption tells me.

By the rocket’s red glare? The bombs bursting in air?

They look like they were sleeping though. They look like they were smart enough to know it was just another night. Best to sleep. Best to rest.

Better to wake up in the morning.

But here we are.

There they are.