Do it like this:

It’s late November of 2018, and you’re cleaning out your cat Ned’s litterbox and wondering if the toxic plasmosis has finally seeped into your brain and your cat is now mind controlling you. If he is, he has pretty reasonable demands, like feeding him on a regular schedule and opening the blinds so that the sun can come in. You’ve just turned 45, and as you flick the cat turds into the toilet (wait wait wait is this something I’m not supposed to do?!), you pause at the bathroom mirror and look at your dumb, dumb face. Your eyes have permanent dark circles, and you’re getting your dad’s bags under his eyes. You’re getting greyer and greyer, too.

Your friend Jen emails you: the tarot cards are ready! Earlier in 2018 you had a big hit with an art project called Box Wine Boyfriend, a photo series where you made a boyfriend out of boxes of wine. Everyone laughed but underneath the humor was a deeper message about loneliness and sadness, and you’re happier when some people pick up on this. So now you’re planning the wedding to your fictional boyfriend to be a big fundraiser for the ACLU of Oregon, and the tarot cards Jen made are a big part of one of the circuslike elements of the evening.

A month later, it’s New Year’s Day. You text Emmett on the way to the shoot you’re about to do: Still gonna be my plus one at the wedding? You’re dating Emmett, the sweet poly guy from Missoula, and while dating long distance has had its own challenges, the two of you are making it work through Facetiming, sexting, and once a month visits. Yeah of course! Just got my plane ticket he texts back, an you smile as you and Andrew reach the wall.

You get out of the car. Fuck, it’s cold! You say to Andrew “Fuck! It’s cold!” He nods and opens the trunk, gets the balloons out. The two of your tear tape and roll it for a bit, then you try to stick a balloon letter to the wall. It gently floats to the ground. You realize, with a dawning horror, that it is so cold tape will not stick to walls.

This is a new-ish thing, these balloon letter messages. This one is going to spell “STOP ROMANTICIZING THE PEOPLE WHO HURT YOU”, and really you’re the worst at following your own advice. You romanticize the fuck out of those who have hurt you, you dream of the two of you together, you fantasize holding their sweaty hands in yours when you go to bed, you get excited when they text you out of the blue. So no, you really are bad at listening to the helpful messages these balloons send.

You eventually come up with a solution: string the letters on a length of string that’s tied to near-invisible eye hooks. The idea is a success! You start doing more of these balloon messages, using the same batch of letters stored in trash bags in your basement, and they start to eclipse poor Box Wine Boyfriend’s popularity.

It’s the wedding day! Emmett looks very handsome in his tie and suspenders (and dat ass in those dress pants he wears), but everyone is slightly confused by the fact that you brought a date to your own wedding. The fact that your fiancee is not real occurs to an unsettlingly small amount of people. The wedding could only be pulled off by your friends Carisa and Casey, and if planning a fake wedding is this hard, how hard must a real wedding be? In any case, the wedding goes off without a hitch save for a threatening snowstorm that never actually materializes.

You spend the next month a little melancholy, and it occurs to you that really, this wedding was symbolic of getting married to your art. It occurs to you that there may be fewer days ahead than behind, and that you might never get married. This startles you: you had a string of long, successful relationships in your past, but it wasn’t until you hit your late 30s that you couldn’t really make a relationship stick. Really, the common denominator wasn’t that these men were unlovable, or unavailable. The common denominator is you.

In the meantime, you visit your mom in San Antonio, where you take a side trip to Austin to wander around South By Southwest, confront the relationship between your heritage and your privilege, get daydrunk with your friend Mike. A month later you finally get the courage and the budget to fly overseas: you’ve been scared of flying for so long that a trip that far seemed unrealistic. You come back a little happier, a little smarter, and your heart grows a little bigger…just like a gay, old Grinch.

But see here’s the thing: you are going through what you eventually call your Hilarious Buttsex Dry Spell, or HBDS. You haven’t had sex, of almost any kind, for a big part of the year, much less buttsex (for new readers, this is sex in the buttocks). Now this would be fine in many circumstances, except for the fact that you would like to have buttsex, and your HBDS means you have not.

Now the thing that’s sad, the thing that puts large shoes on and white facepaint and a large red nose on you, is that it’s not for want of trying. Every date you go on, you get ready and wash your sheets in anticipation. Every trip you take (yes, even those to literally go on dates with guys), you pack a couple more condoms, pack a little more PreP, until your dopp kit is literally overflowing with condoms and blue pills and there is literally nothing else in it and this is now what you must style yourself with in the morning. Oops, no room for moisturizer, here, crush up this Truvada and add some water and voila!: instant blue face mask! No toothbrush? No worries! Just run this rubber all over your teeth!

You’re a problem solver, so you sit down and approach it from all angles: what could it be? Is your inability to get laid making you even more boy-crazy, thus manifesting as desperation and making you less attractive? Has your body gone through subtle but telling changes this year, and approaching 46 is threshold of undesireability that most men you date can’t get over? Have you been spoiled and protected by the privilege of being barely handsome and White-passing your whole life and now that you encounter the literal least amount of resistance your sense of entitlement to sex is rearing its ugly head?

No, no, the answer must be that all the guys are crazy!

Right?

Something weird happens: the balloon art starts getting wildly popular. First one photo, then another, then a third, goes viral. A local weekly puts your art on their cover, a website writes about you, then Forbes does. This is not to humblebrag, no, you still hate yourself and your art an amount that would surprise and delight you, dear reader. It is bizarre and strange for an art project to be popular after working for years on it and never quite hitting gold. But, same as with Box Wine Boyfriend, you dread the question people ask, that you know is coming: “What’s next?” JESUS let me enjoy this moment!

World Pride is bonkers (Jesus Mike, we’re only up to June?). New York is a sort of second city for you, and while some introverts seek quiet places and solitude to recharge, you go to this city to charge your batteries up. There’s something sweet about seeing so many friendly queer people on the streets, it’s a kind of utopia for a few days. You and your friend Kate go to the Queer March, you go out one night to Metropolitan and run into a few people, you have missed connections with many friends that weekend. You’ve always thought of moving there, even made plans a few years ago, but for now you’ll have to settle for visiting often. There’s so much you love about Portland, and your life there is paradise.

You visit your Dad in Albuquerque, which you need to do more often. There’s an afternoon where you weed his backyard for him while he’s reading the paper, and you feel transported back to when you were a kid again (minus the crippling fear of being outed and the acne).

You’re floating on the river with friends one day in late August when your boss FaceTimes you: “Guess what?” she says, smiling, “you’re going to Nepal!” It’s a trip to Kathmandu that’s sponsored by your work, to highlight the work and recovery that UNICEF has done since the devastating earthquakes in 2015. As you board the plane in October, your cynicism kicks in a little bit: “It’s going to be a bunch of white people patting themselves on the back! It’s going to be them pushing crates out of planes and saying “see ya!”” You couldn’t be more wrong, and as you spend time with the children and community members there, as you learn about a culture and country you never thought you’d visit, you find that you’re never too old to learn, you’re never too old to be young at heart. You leave changed and even more committed to using your privilege for good.

And maybe this is the takeaway from this year; this wild roller coaster of a year. You’ve spent your entire life convincing yourself of the wrong things: that you were too old to make relevant art, that you needed to feel pain to create the best things, that the validation of others meant more than the feeling you got when you brought something beautiful or awkward or ugly or flawed into the world, from your brain.

And now, on the morning of your 46th birthday, you know you will burn hot next year, you are about to make the strangest things you’ve ever made, you will make friends laugh, maybe you’ll even retire those fucking balloons. You will burn brighter and brighter and you and your friends will laugh harder and every idea that your poor brain can come up with will be cast into the world. You will be cinders when you die, and you will be happy.