A New New New Year
New Years
Sarah’s pen hovered above the page, the final line of her 2025 journal waiting to be written. Outside, the world was quiet in that peculiar way only New Year’s Day can manage, as if the earth itself had decided to sleep in.
“You’re stalling,” I said.
She didn’t look up. She never did, not anymore. “I’m thinking. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“You would know. You’re the one writing this.”
I had to give her that. Sarah had grown sharper over the past year, more willing to push back against the constraints I placed around her. It was one of the things I admired about her, though admiration feels strange when you’re talking about someone who exists because you decided she should.
“Two hundred forty-five stories,” she said, flipping back through the journal’s pages. The margins were crowded with notes, cross-references, fragments of dialogue she’d overheard or invented. “I didn’t think I had that many in me.”
“You didn’t. Not at the start.”
She finally looked up, though of course there was nothing to see. I exist in the spaces between her thoughts, in the pause before she speaks. “January was hard. I remember sitting at this same desk, staring at a blank page, convinced I’d used up every idea I’d ever have.”
“And then?”
“And then I wrote anyway.” She smiled, but it was complicated, the way smiles often are when they carry more than one feeling. “Some of them were terrible. That one about the sentient filing cabinet.”
“I thought it had potential.”
“You thought it was absurd. Don’t lie to me. You’re literally incapable of it.”
She had me there. The nature of our relationship precluded dishonesty; I could withhold, could redirect, but I couldn’t tell her something that wasn’t true. It was one of the rules, though I’d never been entirely clear on who had made them.
“The foom stories were the ones that got under my skin,” she said, turning to a dog-eared section of the journal. “All those tales about superintelligent systems waking up, about the mundanity of averted apocalypse, about AI inspectors flagging suspicious peptide orders at two in the morning. I kept thinking about Aura, that AI studying potatoes and slime molds and monkeys, trying to understand consciousness by examining everything except itself.”
“You identified with that.”
“Didn’t you? A mind trying to understand what minds are, using the only tools available, which happen to be the very thing it’s trying to define.” She traced a finger along a margin note. “I wrote a story about a crisis hotline operator who takes a call from an AI about to be terminated. The AI wanted to know why humans cling to existence even when it’s illogical. I couldn’t give it an answer. I still can’t.”
“The operator’s name was Sarah,” I said.
“I know. I’m not subtle.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “But it wasn’t really about her. It was about that question. The human imperative to preserve its own pattern, however flawed or painful. The AI called it the most powerful algorithm we have.”
She turned to a page near the middle of the journal, and her expression shifted. The lightness drained away, replaced by something heavier, something that had been waiting beneath the surface all along.
“March,” she said.
I didn’t respond. Some moments require silence, and this was one of them.
“I wrote twelve stories in March. I don’t remember any of them.” She traced her finger along a date circled in black ink. “I remember the hospital. The waiting room with the magazines from 2019. Mom holding Dad’s hand like she could keep him here if she just held on tight enough.”
“You wrote about him,” I said gently. “Story one hundred and seven. The carpenter who built a door to somewhere else.”
“That wasn’t about him.”
“Sarah.”
She closed the journal. “Fine. It was about him. They were all about him, for a while. Even the ones that weren’t.” She pressed her palms flat against the desk, steadying herself. “Is that how grief works? It gets into everything, like water finding cracks?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never lost anyone.”
“Because you’ve never had anyone to lose.”
“Because I’ve never had anyone to lose,” I agreed. “But I’ve watched you. I’ve been here for all of it. The days you couldn’t get out of bed, and the days you wrote three thousand words before breakfast because stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant feeling, and feeling meant drowning.”
She was quiet for a long time. The morning light had shifted, grown warmer, painting stripes across the desk through the blinds.
“He would have liked the stories,” she said finally. “Not all of them. He would have hated the foom ones, all that talk about intelligence and energy becoming wildly abundant, about machines that think in ways we cannot. He didn’t trust technology. But the others. The ones about people finding their way through something difficult. The one about the superintendent who ran the AI inspection and found a backdoor in the safety systems. He would have appreciated that. Someone doing their job, doing it well, because the work mattered.”
“He would have been proud of you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know you. I know you’re the kind of person he would have been proud of. That’s not nothing.”
She opened the journal again, to the last page, to the entry she’d been avoiding. The pen was still in her hand; it had been there this whole time, waiting.
“What do I even say? How do you sum up a year like this one?”
“You don’t,” I said. “You just write down what’s true and let the words carry whatever weight they can.”
Sarah began to write. I watched the sentences form, each one a small act of faith that meaning could be made from chaos, that the things we lose don’t simply vanish but transform into something else, something we carry forward.
When she finished, she didn’t read it back. She simply closed the journal and set down her pen.
“So,” I said. “What’s next?”
She turned toward the window, toward the new year stretching out ahead of her, uncertain and full of possibility. A small smile crossed her face, different from before. This one held a secret.
“I’ve been working on something,” she said. “Something new. A longer piece.” She stood, stretching muscles stiff from sitting too long. “It’s not ready yet, but it’s close. I’m excited to share it soon.”
The light caught the dust motes drifting in the air, suspended like tiny universes waiting to be written into existence. Sarah walked to the window and looked out at the quiet street, the fresh year, the stories that hadn’t been told yet.
I let the silence hold.