it’s the last day of the year, and i’m spending it with edward.

just a bit of a backgrounder: edward has been a friend since high school. we were classmates then. college came and took us to different paths. he went on to the study political science and criminology. i went and tried my hand at a vocational course.

he’s a big-shot journalist now, reporting on crimes in the city. i run an internet cafe.

for the third year now, i’ve spent my last days with edward. it all started in 2008, when edward and his girlfriend invited me over. my only family, my father, never came back from serving at qatar. by serving, i don’t mean in the military. he was a domestic helper in qatar. but the point is: he never came back. edward felt sorry for me and told me to come over at his place.

that night, his girlfriend shelly (i think that was her name) told us about this new year’s game: “one last.” it was a different way of going about your new year’s resolution. you choose something you want to stop doing, and do it for the last time—before the clock strikes 12.

as the minutes ticked towards january 1 of 2009, edward kissed shelly. i smoked my last cigarette.

edward broke up with shelly. last i heard, she got into a car accident. drunk driving, according to the reports.

last year, edward invited me over again. he had a friend over, michael, who he briefed about “one last.” even though sally (i think it was sally) was gone, he remembered the game. he wanted to do it again. to honor her memory, he had said.

michael drank beer. i smoked weed. edward went to the bathroom.

i didn’t ask what he had done in there.

this year, edward and i were the only ones playing “one last.” sally (or maybe shelly was right?) was a page in edward’s history. i never saw michael again after last year’s “one last.”

i didn’t have any more new year’s resolution. i wasn’t about to give up on my drinking. and there was no point in trying to change my personality. i would just have to tell edward that i wasn’t playing “one last” anymore.

when edward called me earlier in the evening, he told me he had something explosive to share.

now he is beckoning me to come out of the house with him.

it is almost midnight.

he points to the fireworks some trigger-happy people were already lighting up and firing to the sky.

“happy new year,” i hear him say behind me.

somewhere, i hear a loud bang.

is it just me, or is it getting darker?