So I’m dallying around the web and I come across This SLOG Post asking what the various Stranger writers were doing ten years ago, New Year’s Eve.   Yes, yes…ten years is a long time.   I suppose.   And what was I doing?   Well lessee…   Ten years ago was the…ah…Millennium!   Yes.   And I decided to celebrate it…alone as I usually am on the holidays…at my childhood vacation spot, Ocean City, New Jersey.   I figured it would be fun, and not rowdy since OC is a dry city.   That’s “dry” as in, no alcohol.   You can’t buy it, you can’t be served it, you can’t drink it in public.   You can drink all the booze you can truck in to your hotel room from just across the city line where a convenient liquor store is conveniently located.   But otherwise, you go without.   Keeps the orangely tanned Jersey shore riffraff away.   No beer cans everywhere, no broken bottles, no smell of urine in the parking lot, no blood on the sidewalks.   I figured I’d celebrate there.

I got a bonus.   OC put on a really magnificent fireworks display at the stroke of midnight, that even Atlantic City across the harbor couldn’t touch.   Because they didn’t even bother.   No sense giving people a reason to leave the casinos.

I had a great time.   I was able to stay at a hotel I could only dream about staying in when I was a kid…the Port ‘O Call, which is the only high rise hotel right on the boardwalk in OC.   Most of the boardwalk treats were open that night, and I had lots of fun.   Then came the magic hour when the calendar rolled from 1900s to 2000 and the fireworks lit the sky and I was on the beach taking it all in and marveling how much my life had changed since I was the geeky little kid who used to love playing by the shore and on the boardwalk there.

I saw a movement behind me and I turned to look.   Two young guys turned towards each other, and while the crowd around them was looking up at the fireworks, embraced and gave each other a loving kiss.

I was dumbfounded.   Then delighted.   Yes, thinks I, progress is being made.   I was happy for them.   Maybe when this new decade is over, I thought to myself, the next will find me in the embrace of my own soulmate.   And at the stroke of midnight we’ll embrace and give each other a kiss just like those two did.   That can’t be too much to hope for.   Could it?

It was.

But don’t ask yourself if there could be anything worse the next decade could tell you then that you’ll still be single and lonely and ten years older on top of that, because there is.   You could find out that the friends you trusted would help you if they could, think that you’re wasting your time pining for a boyfriend because you are just not boyfriend material.   People who look like that want people who look like that… They will look you in the face and tell you that your only hope is to find a trick for the night and get used to having an empty bed the next morning…and they’ll think they’re being kind to you by telling you this.

Ten years later, I really didn’t need to know that.   Not that I would believe it, but that they would tell me that.     Strangers can bash you…they can take your life away from you…but only friends and family can chew your heart up and spit it back out.   That is what the last decade taught me.