My worst New Year’s Eve ever

As far as bad new year’s eves go, I would’ve thought the worst would always be the one I spent alone in Mexico City among thousands of revelers before getting mugged at gunpoint beside a taco stand – plus it was the 2000 “Millennium” party, the one where everyone was bully-hyped into the expectation that they had to have the best party of their lives. But that was until Istanbul, 2006, when I got dumped by my girlfriend right after the countdown… wearing a silly party hat.

Obviously getting dumped is never fun, but it’s even less fun when everyone else is having fun around you, dancing and laughing while your sorry ass just wants to crawl under a placemat to ponder your pathetic excuse for an existence. And the house music doesn’t help things either.

Of course, like all breakups, you always see it coming through little signs… the cold responses, snappy remarks, unreturned calls, the careless “I-hate-you-and-never-want-to-see-you-again”s that are meant to convey the subtle message that you are no longer wanted in that person’s life. Reasons are usually given, but of course there’s only ever one reason why people break up: because one person doesn’t like the other anymore. In my case the reason given was something to do with me being “of a character unfit for my age,” which, when you think about it, is a pretty sorry thing to be, because it basically means she thinks you’re both old and immature, which sucks to know, but sucks even more when she tells it to your face before going off to dance with her friends (whose party it was). Her being ten years younger than me also adds a certain element of “Ouch” regarding the immaturity factor. Of course, this is what men need women for: so as to be reminded of all the unpleasant things they suspect are true about themselves and which they’d rather ignore, but sort of know they shouldn’t, even though it always sucks to hear it. Anyway, it sucked to hear it.

So there I was at a party full of strangers, all dumped, old, immature, of-rotten-character-unbecoming-of-my-age, and not even drunk yet… and still wearing the silly party hat. But I still had my pride and dignity, right? Wrong. I did what every guy who can’t be a man about a situation and just walk away does: I irrationally kept trying to talk to her just so she wouldn’t go away. I just kept uttering things stupidly, aimlessly, to the point where she was looking at me like I was roadkill. And yet, even as I babbled on and on, all that was going through my own head was "shut-up-you-idiot-shut-up-you-idiot"… Simple enough instructions, you’d think, but my mouth was incapable of following them, because it kept saying "bleh bleh bleh" instead. Okay, now I could add moron to the equation, and also include pride and dignity on my new year’s resolution “Things-To-Get” list. Now all I had to look forward to was a very long and painful walk across the room, through what seemed like a thousand mocking eyes, and out the door. Simple, right? Wrong again! How about stopping half way, going back up to her, and asking if I could call and talk some time, even while she and her friends had that look you have when you look at rotting food in a fridge? You know how people say “What am I, chopped liver?” in a joking way? Well I was like “Holy shit, I AM chopped liver!” but not really in a joking way. So now we can add “pathetic” to our impressive tally of adjectives, and move on.

I finally wriggled out of there like a worm, enjoying that warm radiating glow of helplessness, paranoia, panic, loneliness and despair, generally feeling more like a dog’s anus than a human being. But I thought, half-jokingly, almost for sport, that it must be possible for this to get worse… yet how? Well, how about an hour-long cab ride with a talkative taxi driver nudging inch-by-inch in New Year’s Eve traffic from Rumeli Hisarı to Beyoğlu? And how about calling her one more time from my cellular, which of course she didn’t answer? Had enough yet? It was like I had a genius for this, as if even Satan couldn’t have planned an evening this perfectly bad for me. He would have just stood aside in astonishment, waved his hand and said “Dude, it’s all you!” The only thing that could top it all off was a nice pleasant time laying in bed till morning all by myself… just me and my cozy thoughts – and what felt like a bowling ball sinking into my chest – as I picked over the minutiae of everything that had happened over and over again in my head – in between erasing all her contact info from my phone and irrationally trying to un-memorize her phone number (don’t try this, it actually has the reverse effect). It was one of those things you just really wish was all just a bad dream – I mean, really wish, like if I said it over and over enough times it would all just be reversed… you know, like when pigs fly.

And they say your new year will go the way your New Year’s Eve went, which, in a twisted and diabolically ironic way, would mean that I should actually be looking forward to the next one. I can’t wait.