Where I live everyone is quiet as a mouse come the stroke of midnight. People go to sleep early, and there are no parties breaking the still of night. I grew up accustomed to staying up well after the new year had begun, watching the male grownups in my family get drunk, and the female ones had a drink or two, but never got much raucous. There was laughter, music, and the sort of tropical dancing I never learned because I was too busy listening to American and British music, peppered every once in a while with excellent South American emergences of rock and punk.

The characters in my collages can party, and that’s what the couple above is doing. I originally put the image together for a Fourth of July entry at my old blog, but I’m not going to wait until July to repost it when I have a perfect excuse to recycle it tonight. The background story for it was a poem I never wrote. Maybe this new year I’ll get around to doing that. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy my own vision of a very tall woman—let’s call her Undersquid—as she scales a building as easily as she would climb a tree, the tiny man she loves in her possession as she finally sits atop a building now fashioned as a stool.

Her hand is wrapped around him as she brings him higher, closer to her face. She wanted to give him the best seat for watching fireworks that night, but in my mind they never pay attention to the show once it starts, because what happens between the two is much more interesting than explosive patterns in the sky.

Have a happy New Year’s Eve!

Abba – Happy New Year