Hayley
Most mornings in December in Philly in my little apartment look essentially the same: My fiancé leaves for work before daylight, and the cats stay under the covers with me until we all rise for breakfast (canned wet food for them, coffee for me). I optimistically hope for morning snow, and squirm when my phone tells me I can expect mid-fifties temps—it has felt more like March than almost-January, but I try not to think about that too much.
Instead, I think about the last day of the year in Philadelphia, and assign an importance to this diary entry that probably nobody else believes in. Still, the end of December always feels special. It’s special in Philly, as just blocks from my apartment bleachers are erected for the Mummer’s parade, and city-wide hope for post-season Eagles success mounts, and the line outside Fado (to my continued confusion) grows longer and longer, and there is a general shared sense of merriment—or fuck-it-ery—for this week that doesn’t really count.
Maybe I also try to find either an irony or some kind of poetic message in the fact that I won’t really be spending the last day of the year in Philadelphia after all: instead, Tara and I will meet at the 30th street station, and take an Amtrak to DC to see a concert that will go on and on and ring in the new year with a balloon drop and spilling beers and I will forget where I am for a while. Not just in that I didn’t end the last day of the year in Philly, or that I was so lost in the moment, or that DC is just malleable enough that it could really be anywhere, but rather that there is something to be said about the experience of leaving Philly for the night as a whole. It's something that was never really possible for me to experience before living in Philly, the easy access to a train that in two hours could land me in an entirely new city and state. But despite being somewhere that is decidedly not-Philly, I still never feel very far from home.
And that’s really the thing I am trying to land on, I think—Philadelphia is home. This year in Philadelphia has enveloped me in a community and sense of belonging that I am not sure exists anywhere else—in fact, I am not sure it really can. But the community and at-homeness has so permeated me, and my friends, and every slightly-sweaty Amtrak ride we’ve taken (a lot) means that even ending a year in Philadelphia not in Philadelphia at all, I nevertheless felt like I was right at home.
Cheers to Philly, cheers to our community, and cheers to the New Year.
Hayley is a poet from the American Southwest who now studies 19th century British Literature at Temple. Before moving to Philly, she has lived in California, Colorado, South Dakota, and most recently Syracuse New York where she completed her MFA in poetry. Her poetry including her first collection can be found linked in her instagram, @_hbow
