Dear Digital Diary

Dear Digital Diary,

what would happen if, at midnight, the year just…kept going?

“December 32nd” – Short Story

Don and Cass shared a small apartment tucked away in the shadowed corners of Manhattan. They’d started renting it a few years ago, hoping that it’d just be a landing spot until they could find a house in the country. I don’t think they expected to be here this long or spend the last half of 2019 hosting their longtime friend on their living room couch during his depressive But with all inhibitions aside (and the couch free of spare blankets and pillows) I made it a point not to seem emasculated by my ex-girlfriend and decided to attend Don and Cass’ impromptu party. The party had started at eight, just four hours before midnight, but I found myself drunk off of gas station champagne a mere hour later. By ten, I was absolutely plastered and trying to talk up some girl. 

“She just left me,” I slurred, emptying the last bit of champagne from my flute in a singular gulp. “It’s crazy ‘cause you kind of look like her.”

She blinked at me and arched an eyebrow. “Right…”

I leaned in close, closer than I intended, and could smell her perfume. Something French probably, a hint of rose. “Bet you wouldn’t break my heart, though.”

I felt a hand on my shoulder then, and tried to look at it: stubby, masculine, fingers gripped into the fabric of my t-shirt and I frowned.  

“Alright, buddy. I think you’ve had enough,” the man said and grasped my other shoulder, steering me away. It was Don.

Once we made it through the crowd of party-goers to the opposite end of Don’s living room, he flicked the middle of my forehead. “Dude, you’ve got to stop harassing girls.”

He didn’t flick me very hard but the slight force sent my head back so I was looking down at him over my nose. Don shook his head and looked at the plastic flute in my hand. He plucked it from my grasp and stuck it in front of my face.

“And how many of these have you had?”

I ignored him and tried my best to crane my neck, searching for the Girl From Before, but the room spun and I stumbled sideways, nearly falling if it weren’t for Don who caught my shoulder. 

“Don. She looked exactly like Zoey.”

Don righted me and turned, only glancing briefly at his party before slowly shaking his head. “No, she didn’t, man. She wasn’t even brunette.”

“She wasn’t?”

Don shook his head again before Cass appeared behind him, her short red hair tucked behind earlobes that occupied heavy disco ball earrings. She wore those cheap Party City glasses and had ropes of twinkly necklaces hung around her neck. 

“Hey, Babe. What are we talking about?” Cass asked.

“Harry thought your friend from work was Zoey,” Don said. 

At the mention of her name, my stomach did a forward roll but I swallowed the contents back. I shrugged. 

Cass looked behind her shoulder before turning back and giving me that frown that people do when they feel bad. She patted the side of my arm. “Yeah, sorry, hon. That’s Reese. She’s my new assistant.”

I nodded, but couldn’t shake the feeling. I stole a glance at Reese. Even though she no longer looked like her, I was now thinking about Zoey more than before.

Zoey and I dated the same amount of time that Don and Cass did. We did the double date thing and she and Cass were always at our dorm room, and then after when we got an apartment. We were all friends. Then Don and Cass got engaged this past summer, whereas Zoey deemed that season to be my most miserable, and told me she didn’t love me anymore. And because it can always get worse, she thought it even better to say she didn’t even really like me, and she hadn’t for a while.

“I just need to…” I trailed off, stomach twisting again. I deeply inhaled through my nostrils. All I could smell was the sickly sweet champagne on my breath. “I just need a new beginning, you know? Where she’s not in it…”

I would’ve kept bullshitting my life’s redesign but the room had begun to spin. Cass and Don’s faces started to melt together and swim before me while my mouth filled with saliva. 

“We get it, Harry. You just need a new year,” Don said. “Lucky for you, it’s New Year’s Eve.”

I nodded slowly but could feel my face drain of color in a sweeping motion. Cass titled her head. “How about you take a minute outside, Harry? A walk to righten you up?”

I pressed my lips together in a forced smile and my stomach lurched again. I knew I had less than five minutes before I could no longer hold back the flood of champagne and finger foods I’d consumed all night. 

I put on my jacket before Cass pressed the spare apartment key in my hand, ushering me towards the door. “Just be back in time for the ball drop or Don might kill you. You two haven’t done a New Year’s apart since middle school.” 

Don never wanted to live in the city and I hated visiting him there, but the nice thing about being in the Big Apple is that you can puke on the sidewalk and nobody gives a damn. People yak on the street like they’re doing the city a favor, and it just becomes one with the cracks in the asphalt. 

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and then pulled my sleeves over my fingers. It had begun to rain, the cold, icy bullets that chill you to the bone. I would’ve gone back inside to warm up, but the honey in my brain was pressing me onwards, towards central Manhattan. I needed coconut water — or something with electrolytes — and I made it my mission. That’s what Zoey used to drink after nights out and she was never hungover. 

I threw up twice more on the twenty-minute drunk-stumble walk to the inner-city convenience store — once onto those mental grate covers where I watched it drip onto the slushy waste below while I caught my breath, and the second over a trash can just outside the store. 

The bell on the door jingled when I walked in, my sickly self meeting the gaze of this short woman at the counter holding a cigarette. She took a drag and made a little grunting noise before focusing back on the television wedged into the far corner of the ceiling, set up like it was 1995. Anderson Cooper, in his thick glasses and snow-white hair, held a mic and was talking into it deliriously like he’d had a few too many. Good for him. 

In the back of the store, there was a poorly stocked refrigerator, and the closest thing to a coconut water was a blue raspberry Powerade. The sheer blue of it made me nauseous but it was the best I could do, and I grabbed it, browsing the snack rack for something appealing. There were Doritos (too much flavor), Cheetos (too orange), and Smartfood popcorn (kind of bland). I blinked at the three snacks and finally decided on the popcorn. 

That’s when someone screamed. 

It was the shrill, static kind, so I knew it was coming from the television. I tried my best to wobbly sprint towards the front of the store. 

The cashier’s cigarette hung out of her agape mouth and she stared at the screen. I turned slowly. I think I expected it to be a bomb or something of the sort. It’s New York, after all. 

But it was far from that. 

Anderson Cooper’s back was turned and above him, cinematically, was one of the Times Square billboard screens, announcing the new year. But it didn’t read January 1st. Anderson Cooper turned, his finger pressed to his ear, and said quietly into the mic, “The billboards are saying December 32nd.”

I blinked at the television. I turned to the cashier, whose face was still frozen in shock. And then I bolted out of the store, Powerade and popcorn in hand. 

I sprinted through the halt signs, across the busiest streets, and hastily hopped over the blockades until I was at the center of Times Square, packed with people watching the screens in horror. It was plastered on every single billboard. The date had changed, but to a date that had never before existed. 

I pulled my phone out of my back pocket where I found a missed call from Don, and all-cap texts from Cass, just before midnight. Above those notifications, it was 12:06 am, Wednesday, December 32nd.

With the final kick of strength I could muster, I then ran back to Don’s place, taking the fire escape stairs instead of the elevator, and hopping up two at a time. 12:21 am. The hallway was silent except for my heavy panting and squeaking shoes as I fast-walked to their door. I shoved the key into the lock and pushed the door open. 

I spotted Don immediately, who stood over Cass, who had makeup running down her face. I ran over to the pair.

“What’s going on?”

Cass sniffed snottily. “I don’t know,” she choked. “But I already have my wedding invitations printed!”

I looked at Don, who shrugged, eyes wide.

“So?”

Cass glared at me. “What if tomorrow is December 33rd, huh? And then December 34th? What if it just keeps going? The wedding is in February — the invitations say February!”

I backed up then. Cass was adding more crazy and I couldn’t take it.

It could’ve been the fact that my blood ran thick with champagne or the fact that the year hadn’t changed over but was a sick continuation of the previous, or both. Either way, I decided to draft a text for Zoey. I turned and jumped. 

It was Reese, her blue eyes bugging. Up close, she most definitely did not look like Zoey. 

“Hey, you!” she said. I tried to fake her out and dodge around her but she blocked me. “You better repent now. It’s the second coming.”

“What?” I yelped. 

She jabbed a finger into my chest. “I know a sinner when I see one.”

“Get out of my way!” I said, pushing her to the side and bolting.

Cass and Don’s apartment was a singular floor with a limited number of rooms, so I only had so many options to hide. But since their friends were still freaking out and hadn’t gone home, it wasn’t difficult for me to slip away inconspicuously and then beeline it to the bathroom. It was empty. 

I locked the door and didn’t even put the top of the toilet seat down before I sat on top of it. I unlocked my phone, which glowed in the darkness. 12:45 a.m.

My notes app wasn’t cluttered compared to most. I had three notes: one grocery list that I tended to reuse, a list of Zoey’s favorite things that I couldn’t get myself to delete, and the drafted post-breakup text that I did end up sending. She’d read it but never responded. Perhaps she’ll respond to this one, in light of the chaos, and like Reese said, the world could be ending.

I started to type, my fingers flying over the digital keys. It was muddled thought, a word-vomited haiku of my feelings that quickly became a longer work of bullshit that I guess had been ruminating around the cavity of my head for a while. 

A list of red flags I’d always seen in her, but ignored.

Things about how I’m glad I kept Woodstock, the cat we’d adopted together because he always liked me better. 

How pissed I’d been after I found out she was cheating because she hard-launched her new relationship with her personaltrainer just a few weeks after she told me our relationship was essentially a scam. 

But then I wrote how I still loved her, in the end, and even though I hated her existence, I’d also take her back because love and hate tend to coincide with one another, and these past months were brutally painful and emasculating and I wasn’t the same without her. 

By the end of my rant, I’d typed out several nasty paragraphs with surprisingly few red-underlined typos.

I selected the text and then copied it. 

12:57 a.m.

I moved my thumb over my phone screen and hit the message app. I only text four people regularly — Don, Cass, my mom, and my boss — so Zoey’s name wasn’t hard to find. I pasted the copied text in the message box. I almost hit send but someone banged on the door and I jumped, dropping my phone and watching it skid across the floor. 

“They fixed it! Harry, it’s next year! Come on out!”

Cass had the TV on when I went back into the living room which read Glitch in System Fixed After Fifty-Eight Minutes. Anderson Cooper looked a little flushed but he was saying something about a foreign hacker. 

I took my phone out of my back pocket (which now had a cracked screen over the middle) and looked at the time for confirmation. I let out an exhale. 

I then opened my phone and deleted the Zoey Notes, including the one I’d just written. For good measure, I also deleted her contact. I stared at the screen for just a moment before slipping it back into my pocket. 

It was officially January 1st, 2020 — a clean slate.

*This story is original work, and therefore cannot be used for commercial or individual use.