The most desolate place in the history of the world must have been the H'ville Wal-Mart on December 27th at 9:30 pm. I went for emergency breakfast supplies, having returned to a quiet house and empty cupboards after Christmas with my family. I seemed to be nearly the only one shopping besides off-hours Wal-Mart employees, their smocks thrown over one shoulder as they shuffled with their carts through the aisles. I remember being that tired over the summer and wondering why I was wasting my 6.50 an hour when I was too exhausted to eat.

I found my breakfast; coffee, bananas, sensible cereal for the health conscious, New Year's me, and then I moved over to the other side to purchase the things I call Single Girl Staples in my head...things I really don't need but like to have to make me feel good, if only for a few minutes. Bubble bath. Lip Gloss. A fuzzy robe the light green hue of Easter basket grass that was on clearance and in exchange for the robe I received for Christmas and didn't like. A glossy magazine with some starlet promising me killer abs for 2007 on the cover.

A few high school kids were standing in groups near the front, laughing and looking earnestly ridiculous in the way only fifteen year olds can and I felt old, browsing the marked down business wear next to the jewelry. I noticed the "Winter Wonderland" that had taken up residence in the Garden Center back in late September had already been struck down, and rows and rows of Valentines and pink and red cardboard hearts lined the seasonal aisles where the candy canes and popcorn tins had been just yesterday. Life, at least in commerce, moves on without ever looking back.

In that sort of bleak little dip in the calendar between Christmas and New Year's I always start thinking about what's going to happen next. How January 1st could possibly herald in better fortune, more responsibility, a better me. It's such a naive way to look at our future...maybe the only great superstition that everyone wants to have faith in anymore...that magically at the stroke of midnight on New Year's we will have another chance to be special, to be better. That the man or woman we hastily kissed on the cheek when the ball drops will be the person we will kiss goodnight for the rest of our lives. That just because you stayed home on New Year's to watch Dick Clark in your pajamas doesn't mean the rest of 2007 will be the same way.

I don't know...I've always been sad on New Year's, even on the occasions when I've been surrounded by my friends and family. Even when I had a relationship, or the prospect of one. New Years always makes me feel so insignificant, because the realization that we hang our hopes on an arbitrary calendar date and time every year seems somewhat hopeless to me.

Maybe it's just a post-holiday lull for me, but every year I dread New Year's. I wish I could figure out why.