Imagine my surprise when I flipped open this diary and saw only half a page left. Seriously, just imagine it. My eyes comically wide, my mouth a perfect little O, my hand to my breast as if to calm my heart’s frantic beating. Goodness gracious, the word-pictures your imagination paints.

So I flip back through the pages and regret some of the entries. So much should’ve been cut down, making room for future days. A mountain of adjectives, labyrinths of circumlocution. Overlong words. Belabored points. Repetitive redundancies. Each entry could’ve been reduced to a single, non-run-on sentence, easy. Or even a series of keywords, just something to jog my memory, because it’s not like these were for outsiders to read. Like: box, weepy, phenylephrine, sunstroke, doubt. There would’ve been room for the rest of my days, and the final product would’ve been a lot cooler, a lot more enigmatic, something to be puzzled over by future scholars with their cyborg spectacles and nanobotic indices or whatever.

But there I go again: The future scholars won’t be getting their stinking biomechanical hands on this diary, because once I get to the bottom of this page (imminent!), I shall seal it with duct tape, emblazon the cover with the hobo symbol for there’s no use going this way, and then leave it in the microwave until it’s a circle of radioactive cinders.

Then I’ll sit on the bathroom floor and watch this year die, crawling, gasping, all melodramatic, go on without me — cough! And I’ll euthanize it with the bottle of Thunderbird I got at the Christmas party (“vinted & bottled in Modesto, Calif.”), and I’ll roll its bones into the recycling bin and leave it out in the snow, and tomorrow I’ll birth something new, something flushed and squalling, something handsome and charming, something lurid, something vast, and, above all, something di