Dear 2015,

I am ashamed to say that I am not quite ready to let you go just yet. This, you must know after spending every minute of your time with me. I can confidently say that you know me intimately, the way no other person does. So you surely know that I never have a problem with letting go. But you, 2015, are proving difficult to let go. We are 14 days in to 2016, exactly two weeks since I said goodbye to you, and I should have let go. But you have a way of sneaking and creeping your way back into my mind and just when I least expect it, you show yourself. See, yesterday while I was going through my day, trying to get acquainted with 2016, which by now you must know is your replacement, I might have hurt my right forearm. I don't know how this happened, 2015. What I know is that I was in class and when I took my pen to jot something down in my notebook, I felt this pain, it wasn't a sharp pain nor was it the wonderful ache of having pulled a previously unused muscle. No, this was a dull throbbing ache. It was continuous that it made me aware of how I was using my right hand. Like how my fingers flew across my phone while typing a text, or how I gripped my toothbrush just before bed or how I had to use my left hand to hold my Kindle while reading in bed. And so in my journal entry, I tried to remember where and when I could have hit my arm, because surely, in the midst of the mundaneness that made my day, I must have. Could it be in the morning while I was taking a shower? Making my coffee? Lifting my bag full of books? Walking? During my commute and changing of busses? Needless to say, I couldn't figure it out. And this brought me to the sudden realisation that I need to be present. I need to be able to let you go and be aware of my ordinary everyday existence, because otherwise, I will kill my ability to be always present. And you know that I like being present.

But 2015, I don't know what it is about you that makes it hard to let go. Other than my graduation in December and that time I had a near death experience in October, nothing about you stands out in my mind. I have to think really hard to come up with the memories that you and I shared. That you and I made. And yet the calender in my bedroom stopped at September. I stopped turning the page with every new month after that as if turning the pages would prevent time from going on. In October, you might recall that my red watch stopped working. And in what I can only call a mysterious turn of events, just before your inevitable ending, 2015, my brown leather watch stopped at 10 minutes to two. If were a superstitious person -which both of us know I am not (I called myself level headed, sometime in our relationship and you seemed to agree) I could have said that this was a sign. But alas, all things must end, despite you prolonging our eventual parting by introducing me to the Strokes' The End has no End which I loved and still do.

But 2015, this clinging to each other is not healthy. Perhaps in my own warped way I thought that by my clinging to you, you could redeem yourself, just like you did at the beginning when I told you that I didn't like odd numbers and you told me you were special because you were smack in the middle of the decade. That somehow I could remember something exceptionally spectacular that you did in the future. You perfomed poorly, 2015. And, despite us having quiet late date nights reading and drinking tea-infused vodka (I'll remember those nights with fondness, even when I am already doing the same with 2016) you and I must part. So, to quote The Indigo Girls, "Time has made history of us." This, 2015, is goodbye. Here's to a future nodding acquaintanceship

Yours, with love,
Lina