To A New Year, Goodbye To The Last Time

To a New Year, Goodbye to the Last Time

To The People We Will Never Know again.

To The People Who Have Passed From My Knowing.

Another year passes away, never to exist again.

2025 is no longer something I am living—it has become a memory, a sealed page in the book of my life. I can't revise it. I can't return to it. I can only carry what it left behind. Every year does this quietly and without asking permission, but some years take more with them than others.

This one took a lot.

I want to believe that 2026 will be better. I don't say that with certainty—only with hope, which is a different animal entirely. The truth is, this coming year already has more scars than many before it, wounds inherited from battles I'm still fighting. I guess that's how time works as you get older. The years don't get lighter; you just learn how to carry more weight without collapsing under it.

Still, I'm standing at the threshold of something new.

Not just a new chapter— 
a whole new book.

Whatever comes next will not be written the same way as before. I am not the same person who started the last volume. I have loved, lost, grieved, survived, and been changed in ways I can't undo even if I want to. I would if I could, but this year closes behind me with ghosts and memories and unanswered questions—but it also closes with truth. Hard-won, blood-soaked truth.

And with that, I turn the page.

As I look back over the past year—and the year before that—I don't have a poetic way to describe it.

It was hell.

It was awful. Exhausting. A slow, grinding devastation that didn't always announce itself loudly, but changed me anyway—the way erosion changes stone. There are so many details I've already spoken, written, cried through until my voice went hoarse and my hands went numb. I don't need to say them all again. What matters is this:

I lost a lot of people.

Friends. Close friends. People I saw regularly, whose laughter I knew by heart. People who mattered deeply to me, who were woven into the fabric of my daily existence. Some of that loss happened because I chose distance. I cut people out. I needed space—real space. Not performative healing. Not polite silence while everyone whispered behind careful smiles. I needed people to stop talking about my relationship, my marriage, my pain, because that was all anyone wanted to focus on and it is all I could do. I was bleeding internally, hemorrhaging in ways no one could see.

Other losses… I don't fully understand. Maybe they were mutual. Maybe they weren't. Maybe it doesn't matter anymore, though it still feels like it does at 3 AM when sleep won't come.

For the past two years I've lived with crippling anxiety and agoraphobia—enough to qualify for disability, though saying that out loud still feels like admitting defeat. Leaving the house was terrifying. Existing felt heavy, like moving through water with weights tied to my ankles. I missed people desperately, but wanting to see someone and being able to are two very different things. One is longing. The other is capability. I had plenty of the first and almost none of the second.

And the truth—the thing that still breaks me when I let myself think about it—is that I can't think of a single person I don't wish I could see again.

I've never lived my life like it might be the last time I see someone. I've never wanted to walk around braced for catastrophe, treating every goodbye like a funeral. Yes, people die suddenly, and that's horrifying. But that's not what haunts me.

What haunts me are the people who are still alive.

The ones who cross my mind and make me pause mid-sentence, mid-breath. The ones I was once close to—genuinely, deeply close to. The ones who slowly—or abruptly—became obsolete in my life. Not because we stopped caring, but because life fractured and we didn't know how to bridge the distance. Because someone had to reach first and no one did. Because silence became easier than explanation.

I turn 45 this year, and I find myself wondering how many people I've already seen or spoken to for the last time.

Not because they died. 
Not because I died. 
But because life moved on without warning, without ceremony, without a single moment where we acknowledged what was ending.

How many of us will sit in old age and think, What ever happened to them? 
How many regrets will be born not from cruelty, but from silence? 
From the slow drift of days that becomes months that becomes years that becomes never again?

If I'm being brutally honest—the kind of honesty that feels like swallowing glass—I would take almost anything back in my life if it meant I could reset the clock to two years ago.

Anything.

Not the chaos. Not the betrayal. Not the implosion that tore through my existence like a wildfire. I don't want to relive that. What I want is the life I had before it shattered. The actual life. The actual people. The rhythms I took for granted. The marriage I thought was permanent. The ordinary moments I didn't know were already disappearing even as I lived them.

I loved my life.

I loved being married. I loved having a partner I shared the world with, someone who knew my silences as well as my words. I loved seeing people regularly, having continuity, belonging somewhere—truly belonging, not just passing through. I hate—that it's gone. No amount of wishing, bargaining, or replaying conversations in my head at 2 AM will bring that version of my life back. It's as dead as 2025 is now. As unreachable as childhood.

I hate knowing that there are people I will never see or hear from again

I hate the false hope that we feed ourselves that we will see or speak to them again. How can we say for certain how many people have we already lost along our way.

I reached out. I really did. To friends. To people who mattered, who I thought mattered to them too. And none of them came back. I understand—these past two years have been a chaotic, painful mess for me. Anxiety. Depression. Grief that made me hard to be around, made me unpredictable, made me someone even I didn't recognize some days.

But some doors didn't just close. 
They stayed shut even when I knocked. 
Even when I knocked again. 
Even when I stood there, hand raised, waiting.

Maybe that means those people weren't meant to come with me into whatever comes next. I can accept that intellectually, the way you accept that winter follows fall. Emotionally, it still feels like losing parts of myself—like someone took scissors to my history and cut people out, leaving holes shaped like laughter and late-night conversations and shared memories that now belong only to me.

I think a lot about last times.

The last time I saw Jeffrey in person it was at the Flying M Coffee Shop. We sat across from each other drinking Earl Grey tea with cream. A completely ordinary moment. The kind you never mark as important. The kind that makes up most of life, actually—these unremarkable meetings that feel like they'll happen forever.

We didn't know that was it.

The last time we spoke on the phone was two Octobers ago. I wasn't trying to fight. I wasn't assigning blame or keeping score. He got upset. And then there was silence. And then time turned silence into absence, the way it always does if you let it go long enough.

That's how most endings happen. Not with a bang, but with a cup of tea and no idea it's the last one. Not with a dramatic finale, but with an ordinary Tuesday that you don't think to memorize.

There are friends from junior high and high school I don't talk to often, but I know we'll talk again. We check in. We like each other's posts. Sometimes we call out of nowhere just to say I was thinking about you. Those friendships feel like family—stretched across distance and years, but intact. Elastic enough to survive the gaps.

This is different.

This is realizing that there are important people in my life who may already be gone forever—not dead, just unreachable. Just on the other side of a silence neither of us knows how to break anymore.

And my husband.

Fourteen years.

We went from seeing and speaking to each other almost every day to nothing. One day we were kissing goodbye in the morning, making plans for dinner, existing in each other's orbits the way planets do—constant, predictable, essential. The next, he walked into a new life and I was erased from it. And eventually, he was erased from mine. Not intentionally. Not cruelly. Just… necessarily.

Not dead. 
Just… gone.

No one else will ever know him the way I do. No one else will ever know me the way he does. No matter who comes next for either of us, no amount of new time will ever equal the life we shared—the hours, the memories, the intimacy of having built a world together from nothing. Of knowing someone's breathing patterns in sleep. Of finishing each other's sentences not because it's cute but because you've had the same conversation so many times you've worn grooves into it.

That knowledge is devastating.

Not the loss itself—though that's devastating too—but knowing that what we had was irreplaceable and we let it die anyway. That we were witnesses to each other's lives in ways no one else ever will be, and now we're strangers.

What kills me isn't just the pain. It's the waste.

It took 8 billion years for each of us to be born in this universe. Every single one of us is a statistical miracle—the right atoms, the right moment, the right chain of ancestors surviving long enough to create us. We were born long enough to know each other—and then we let it dissolve into memory. We were born to know each other, and we throw it away for the present moment, for our pride, for our pain, for a thousand reasons that will seem so small when we're dying.

I don't believe these people were meaningless. I don't believe those years were mistakes. I don't believe my marriage or my friendships were just lessons to discard once I'd learned what they had to teach me.

They mattered. 
They still matter. 
They will always matter, whether they know it or not.

But this next chapter of my life cannot be built the same way.

I won't be as available as I once was. I won't let everyone in just because they knock. I won't build my life around people who may vanish without warning, who may decide one day that I'm too much trouble or not enough of whatever they need. I don't want to add any more living ghosts to my history—don't want to accumulate more faces that will haunt me in quiet moments, more names I can't say out loud without something in my chest constricting.

My circle will be smaller. 
Chosen. 
Rooted where I choose to live, not scattered across time zones and life changes and good intentions that never materialize into action.

Not because I love less—but because I loved deeply, and I know the cost. I know what it feels like to invest everything in people and watch them drift away like smoke. I know what it's like to be someone's last time without knowing it.

I miss them all. I miss the life I had. I miss the version of me who didn't know how fragile everything was, who moved through the world assuming continuity, assuming tomorrow would look mostly like today. Who didn't count last times because I didn't know I should be counting.

And if I could go back two years—knowing what I know now—I would do so much differently.

But I can't.

So I carry the ghosts with me, and I step forward anyway—into a new year, a new life, a new book—trying to build something honest from what remains. Not hopeful, exactly. Not optimistic. Just honest. Just willing to keep writing even though I know how stories can end.

The page turns whether we're ready or not.

From now on, see you later will mean see you later, I hope.

But goodbye—goodbye I will carry with the heaviness of preparation,

with the knowing that it may have been the last time.

And another year passes away, never to exist again.

Dusty Ray Windsoul

1/1/2026 

1:40am