For A Moment, I Thought Things Were About To Get Better

But the new year revealed this to be a phantom hope

Have you felt the phantom hope of the new year? Or, maybe more precisely, did you feel it, past tense, if only for a moment?

This phantom hope was the opposite of a phantom pain. It was a false pleasure, a trick of endorphins. Sometime around late December, I started to let myself believe that things were about to change. I felt like a wide, slow turn had begun. In the manner of a plane banking at ten degrees before a final descent out of an endless holding pattern, it seemed possible that the world was poised to be on its way again.

How could it not be? We were soon to have a new president — if not an ideal one, at least not a ruinous one. Vaccines were coming — sputteringly but promisingly. The shortest day of the year was behind us. On Christmas Eve, the temperature neared sixty degrees in my city. Everyone was still masked, but I spotted a few people in shorts.

On New Year’s Day, I attended the Zoom wedding of a friend. Unsure what to wear to such an event, I opened my closet that morning and searched, for the first time in nearly a year, for something “nice” — or at least something that might, from the waist up, convey proper respect for the occasion. Once I got past the slouchy…