You hunker down for another cuffing season, but without being cuffed to someone. You buy eggnog in bulk. You get your full size body pillow, name him Jeffrey. You brush your cat Ned, fluff up his fur for maximum cuddle potential. This is the hallmark of your last- seven? Eight?- Christmases, that you’re alone during them.

You’re prepared for Christmas 2017 to be the same, when this guy’s kind smile catches your eye from across the country. He visits you a couple times, you visit him in the Bronx, and just like that you’re cuffed. Even the eggnog tastes better when thinking of Chris’ warm, large, generous eyes. As the new year rolls over, you think you know how 2018 is going to go for you. You have no idea how wrong you are.

You spend your winter dating this guy across the country. Chris lets you into his life effortlessly, introducing you to his friends, his coworkers. Later, when Chris ends things in February, you wonder if it was kindness in his friends’ eyes or pity. This is our job, as good friends to our loved ones, to see these people, these lovers, mysteriously come into their lives and leave just as quickly. When you’re introduced to a guy’s circle of friends, you like to think of yourself as the Very Special Guest Star. It’s a cameo, sure, but once those two studios get their shit worked out you might even have a recurring role.

You use the time you now have “not traveling” to finish an art project you’ve been working on. A few years ago it occurred to you that it would be funny to make fun of yourself after the breakup with David, to make a companion out of drained, discarded boxes of wine. You spend a few days finishing the suitor and then on an overcast February Sunday, you and your friend Niscelle spend a day in your neighborhood taking photos. She suggests the pose for the last of four photos, and it turns out to be the best: you and your Box Wine Boyfriend in an embrace, eyes closed, head leaned against each other. You post the photos on a Monday morning on Twitter, your garbage social media.

You wake up Tuesday morning, roll over, and check your phone. You have dozens of press requests in your email inbox. You open up a couple social media apps to find that the photo series has gone viral. You try to open Twitter: it struggles, finally opens with a visible twitch, an audible groan.

The next week is a whirlwind, but as with everything, your 15 minutes of fame are up and life goes on as normal. You decide to make the photo series a year long project, following the trajectory of a typical successful relationship. It’s funny on the surface, but you know you’ve channeled that weird loneliness you feel into something that struck a chord with people.

It’s March now, and you have your first gallery show. It heavily references online culture and your dad builds the frames for the pieces out of wood to resemble cell phones, and they’re mounted to the wall with selfie sticks. In a way, the show is a testament to your relationship with your phone.

In the late spring, you start chatting with a particularly handsome boy, Jerry. It turns out he’s partnered and they’re visiting Seattle soon. The three of you hit it off, and you make the short trip to Seattle to meet Jerry and his boyfriend Ben. The overwhelming emotion when you meet them and start flirting with them is not affection, not horniness, but a vague guilt. Catholic guilt is the lingering fart in the work bathroom that you can smell just underneath the air freshener.

By the time the three of you see each other a second time in DC, and a third time in New York in July, you’re having the more serious questions about What Are We and Where Is This Going? If they were local or single the waters would be so much easier to navigate, but as it is you decide to remain close friends until your lives bring you closer again.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, where the grey days in a year come close to outweighing the sunny days, you’ve learned to hoard the sunshine in the summer, to cherish it like Gollum cherishes the One True Ring. Summer is your Precious (not based on the novel Push by Sapphire) and you plan to spend the entire season outside.

You meet Carson. Is it his white pelt, is it his hooves, or the horn on his head that you find the most appealing? Because this guy is a unicorn: handsome, recently single, and bizarrely enough he is local. Small red flag: he lives with his ex, Daryl. But you end up making a cute scarf from all the red flags and continue the courtship.

You continue the Box Wine Boyfriend saga by enrolling your friends to help with an engagement photo series, taken by your talented friend Cole. Unsurprisingly, it’s a huge hit, and you have the same experience waking up on a Tuesday that you did months earlier. Groundhog day is real.

This time having your art thrust into the public eye twice in one year feels selfish, especially when the world is so full of darkness and cruelty, so you reach out to the ACLU of Oregon. You want to wrap up the Box Wine Boyfriend series with a wedding that will be a fundraiser for them, in an effort to channel some of the viral energy into something with meaningful impact.

Carson sits you down one day: “I could see you being someone I would be happy with in a relationship, but…” Carson has decided to stay with his ex boyfriend Daryl, but he remains a good friend. You even meet Daryl shortly after, discuss the situation and hang out with the two of them.

You ask Carson for help with a particularly challenging photo, with words spelled out with balloons. In the current climate, some of your photos have now taken a sharp turn for the political, and not without consequence or controversy. You made this creature, your child, but you’re not responsible for its success, it’s just a reflection of what people are yearning to see. Does that make sense? You shake your head, it is a clumsy metaphor.

A couple weeks later, you get the message from Daryl towards the end of your day at work. “Mike” he starts. “I don’t know how to say this. Carson is dead.”

Your vision narrows, every pore seemingly closes, your limbs retract back into your body, you fold into your self like a robot turning into a car. You go home in a fog, you hold your cat close, you hold back the tears, because surely you don’t have a right to grieve, yes? There are people who loved Carson far longer and harder than you, they deserve to grieve. It’s not always about you, Mike.

This is how your year ends, with the quiet passing of a former lover, and the gentle reminder that there are probably fewer days ahead than behind. You ask Daryl to find the blue shirt for you, and he does.

In your living room, you pick up your phone, this weird slab of black glass that gave you so much of your life’s headlines this year. You open your photos, scroll back. You are looking for that one photo of Carson cuddling your cat Ned, you want to send it to Daryl. You scroll back, it’s not there, you check your deleted photos, or the photos you have sent Carson, it’s not there either. You scroll farther back, it would not be here, these photos are from before you met Carson, there are Ben and Jerry, there are the photos from seeing your Dad in Albuquerque this year and your mom in San Antonio. You scroll back, faster this time. There you are, moving to Portland six years ago from Los Angeles, knowing one person here, scared and reckless. Faster, your finger swipes up the phone’s surface like it’s making it rain, there you are in Los Angeles, there’s Charlie, there’s poor sweet Cat dying in your arms and there you are getting Ned handed over to you in a Walgreens parking lot in the middle of the night.

Faster now, your finger is a blur, how are these photos even on here, this was before camera phones. Outside your living room it flips from day to night faster and faster, it’s now a strobe effect flashing through your blinds. You’re in Chicago, you’re in college, you’re in middle school, you finally stop. Your finger holds its place on a grainy photo of you. The light outside stops strobing.

Now you remember this photo being taken. You were at home, wearing your favorite red shirt. You looked back , someone was taking your picture, maybe it was your mom. You remember this now. You looked into the lens, you saw a man with a beard, maybe thirty, forty years older than you looking at you from inside the camera, like a reflection but not quite. He was going grey, he looked like he was used to being disappointed but he seemed mostly happy.

The shadows outside have slowed and stopped, the light rests at a dim sepiatone. The boy in the photo sees you looking, he smiles. You smile back. You were wrong, the older you, you thought it was getting towards evening, your life. The boy smiled because he knew better.

He knew it was morning.