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It’s that feeling you get when you’re finishing up a journal. Its pages are well-loved and familiar, penned in various colors of ink. Each day’s handwriting offers telltale signs to what kind of day it was: hard, messy scratch for frustrating ones; clean, pert lines for productive ones; words nearly tumbling off the page on the days when you were down with the flu and couldn’t write straight. It’s the last page now, and you remember fondly the day you opened it for the first time, how careful you were to keep it neat and clean. You laugh at such a notion. Life happens; “neat and clean” is well and good, but it’s the precious nuances of your penmanship that you appreciate now, knowing that part of your soul is etched in every word—that a chunk of your life, real life, is recorded in those pages.

Then you open up the new volume. Crisp. Clean. A world of possibilities. You wonder what will fill its pages. Again, you start out slow and painstaking, hoping for a genuinely cleaner story this time; but again, you know real life is messy, and soon the pages will drip with blood, sweat, and tears as well as ink.

That is the feeling of the 11:59pm of New Year’s Eve. It ought to be more momentous, it seems, since a whole calendar year has been filed away into history books; yet it happens quietly, with the tick of a clock, and the explosions of fireworks over the cities seem a bit too cheerful for such a moment of melancholy wonder. The pages ahead—all 365—are blank, white. Your pen is poised. You resolve to take care, but you know—real life is messy, and time will wear them away with both hardship and joy.

There’s a fleeting moment in which you wonder if you should give up the writing. Maybe it would be easier to disengage. But then you are brave, and you set the nib to the sheet. You begin. And you don’t look back.