New year, new 12 year old

The house certainly was warm. Still snacking on Christmas’ leftovers and generally seeing the new year in was a thrill. I’ve never lost the “wow, it’s (newest year) now” with a bit of a thrill, though that has died down a lot. At most, we might’ve gone to see a firework show either on or near new years eve, but overall we’ve never celebrated it. The only thing that we did on a year-to-year basis was to write a few resolutions, and generally mine were somewhat trivial by comparison, such is a 12 year-old’s resolutions.

The house though? We’d likely still had our Christmas decorations up, so it’d have been quite seasonal, Christmas tree and all, that I can remember. We didn’t really do much on New Years day at all, but the aforementioned leftovers, never really a good time for various reasons aside from it being the day after my dad’s birthday, especially having to try and think up new year’s resolutions. Aside from all of that, if I wasn’t doing anything, I likely was playing on my playstation, something like Spiderman or Spyro. A few in an assortment of other games for my playstation that I got for Christmas, unless I got it before I was 12.

If I recall, before I probably glued myself to the television for the rest of the day, me and dad took our dog, Jasmine, for a walk into Melbourne park, this was when we were still in Chelmsford; not the greatest of neighbourhoods, but we lived in the half-decent part of it.

We took a roundabout route through the forest that acted as a green-belt between Melbourne park and another suburban sprawl, it wasn’t very muddy due to the frost and time of day, but I remember thinking how much different this place got every season. It’s quite easy to notice the seasons when you have the stark contrast of urbanization and nature next to each other, one changing faster than the other. subsequently it’s also easy to think how things will change in the future in general. 

I can see in my mind now how easy it was to play hide and seek with friends in the summer, but it was virtually impossible in the winter unless you were prone and laying in the mud, which I deemed an issue in and of itself, so we did other things instead.

I digress though. The walks were cold, but with the coats and gloves were good to keep warm, especially at the decent pace we walked. After doing a loop, we returned home and took off our shoes at the door, lest we messy the house, especially as it looked so fantastic with all the decorations up still.

I will say though, as an after-thought, my memory is very bad. I can’t say as to why, but when I try to look back, I can visualize a memory and what happened, but rarely when, even then it’s a tenuous memory that could’ve been fiction or fact. I wonder if you, reading this, find it strange that I can only remember small, distinct snippets of my childhood or even adolescence, Because I do.

So the aforementioned is meant to say “My new years day when I was 12? I can’t remember wholly, or if I do it’s mixed up with others”. It’s scary to think that perhaps 20 years from now I won’t remember that I used to smoke a lot, but quit. Not a great example but still. If I can barely remember the house I lived in when I was 12, there’s going to be a lot missing by the time I’m 43, particularly the house in Halstead and its associated memories (though I remember those somewhat more clearly)

I could end on the sour note of “Trying to remember my new year’s day when I was 12 is a sad reminder that my already atrociously bad memory will begin to affect everything else that has ever happened to me, majorly or not”. But frankly, having a bad memory might not be so bad if you look at it in a certain way; I’ve made mistakes that I should have been able to deal with at the time, hindsight is 20/20, but once you forget how you should have dealt with them, you’ll forget the problem, then ultimately the whole scenario, and it’s more like hindsight is 0/0 at that point. like it was never a problem to begin with.