Smitten Like It’s 1999

---01.01.2000---

Even moments before midnight, I doubted the clock’s unstoppable march. Would they really manage to make it to 2000? Would that last passing second really have the strength to roll over all those zeros? Incredibly, it did and we all found ourselves drunkenly stumbling into yet another 1000 years.

The evening started off with me still trying to get a costume together for the coming party. Wire frame sunglasses were added to white overalls recovered from the wreck of the Cita (a cargo ship which ran aground about three years ago sending almost all of its 200 shipping containers of goods into the sea, many of which broke open on Scilly’s shores). These were subsequently joined by a skin-tight, horizontally-striped shirt of blue and purple. The coup de gras was my hair, washed and blow dried into an afro of gigantic proportions. I was the Factory, experimental art films, “Groovy baby!” and Art Garfunkel wrapped into one.

Ellen and Bryce invited me over to start off at their place with a fine dinner, among raucous friends, that would degenerate into champagne-fueled sing-a-long, charging at top volume through the standards of our generation.

They, along with all of their friends, were dressing as their ancestors. This information hadn’t prepared me for the moment I walked into the sitting room of their guest house and saw Clare sitting there in a strappy, vaguely Egyptian shift, false eyelashes, and a long, platinum-white wig. The black, onyx necklace she wore fanned out from pronounced clavicle to pronounced clavicle. She looked so gorgeous, I almost stopped breathing.

After I recovered I spent the whole dinner trying to work out how to spend as much time as possible with her over the next week. The only thing that distracted me was the fact that Ellen and Bryce had prepared a fantastically delicious meal of local beef, sea spinach mouse, potatoes, unspeakably good crepes topped with salmon, creme fraiche, and caviar, all to be rinsed away with an astute, 10-year-old champaign, one bottle of which is uncorked at every significant milestone they celebrate as they pass through their lives. Best New Year’s Eve dinner ever.

We ate, we sang, we ate some more and slowly made our way down to the Island Hall, which had been decorated to ring in the new year, and shined like a beacon at the far end of the island. Inside it was all tin foil stars, dark, sailcloth sky, white plaster walls, wide planked floors, and the frosty, snow-white-and-blue windows of high school theater sets. “2000” was spelled out over the door in fairy lights, rendering the coming year in home-town proportions. The hall looked fine indeed. I’m not sure who’d had a hand in decorating for the occasion but they’d done a marvelous job. Revelers were in full swing as we arrived. We all got drinks and stood outside chatting.

A few minutes later Clare’s mouth formed the bullet, “My boyfriend blah, blah, blah...” Had she realized she’d been carrying a rifle? It didn’t matter—I’d been struck. At that moment my awareness collapsed in on itself. I came too after a few moments, still in mid conversation, but the flash of her words erased from my memory everything else that she said the entire evening. All I can remember is her platinum hair, demure smile, and the most perfect fireworks display I’ve ever seen as a group of men lined up and set off ship’s flares which rocketed into the air and exploded, to float in the near sky like weightless lanterns, illuminating the misty-wet night, the islanders, and the round little hill in front of the Island Hall.

---12.29.2023---

It’s me in the present again.

Did I tease her and say, “You have a boyfriend? And you’re here on this magic island, partying like it’s actually 1999. Where is he? Is he for real?” I didn’t.

Instead, I stayed in the mindset of “take it as it comes,” of seeking approval from others. I didn’t value my own desire or search for paths to bring them into being.  

I wish had. I guess I still sometimes struggle with advocating for my desires, even today.