New Year’s Day feels like a fake day.

You wake up in your childhood bedroom, and the sun is peeking through the blinds, sharp shadows shifting slowly across the baby-blue walls. You trudge downstairs to the kitchen and have your bowl of cereal with a small rotating cast of family members while scrolling through your phone. You throw on your overcoat and boots and open the door to the chill of the morning air. All unremarkable. Nothing of importance can happen on New Year’s Day.

Last night was terribly stormy, and to-morrow’s forecast portends more of the same inclement weather, but to-day is pleasantly clear in an eerily still sort of way. The pavement, damp from last night’s storms, glistens. It’s like the World paused to catch its breath.

You drive through the streets and take the oak-lined boulevard to the park. It feels like you’re driving through a movie. None of this is real. There are people dotting the sidewalks, and they’re doing activities, yes, walking their dogs and kids, but you can’t shake the feeling that they’re all just NPCs, milling about a painted backdrop of park and hill and sky as 2023 finishes loading. After all, New Year’s Day is a holiday, so nobody’s really doing anything, are they? There are probably far-off people who are keeping the world’s machinery humming, delivering the New Year’s babies and piloting the New Year’s flights, but as far as you can tell, no History is going to happen to-day.

New Year’s Day is a static day. Maybe everyone will come to some unspoken agreement to write the day off as a pleasant collective dream. You half-expect all the NPCs to finish the day where they started.

Maybe you thought the day would be inherently more exciting, what with it being 2023 and all. But the novelty of that wore off half an hour after midnight, sometime in between the second and third glass of champagne, and much to your disappointment, nothing has changed. Maybe some state laws passed a few years ago have just taken effect, and some far-off country has joined the Eurozone. But it doesn’t feel like the world lurched one year into the Future. You are disappointed in the world for not doing that, and you are also disappointed in yourself for vaguely expecting it to do that.

There’s a dance in the park. You’re still very much aware that you’re caught frozen in a weird little hiccup in Time, but maybe that’s just you. Maybe it’s time for the year to begin. You walk up to them, just in time for the Charleston lesson.