N is for New Year's Eve.

The only thing I ever remember you saying to me was this: I’m trying really hard not to tell you that I love you. Surprising to most, but not to me, so used am I to this clever turn of phrase. It’s almost as if you kids formed a club – The Boys Who May or May Not Have Loved Kat. Oh, you guys. But you, you were the first - the first to set this pattern of “I Say I Don’t Love Her But I Really Love Her,” thereby successfully ruining every relationship I’ve ever had, so quick am I now to discount another’s aural display of affection. But that New Year’s Eve, when she was in Hawaii and we were together in New Orleans, and you wanted me for who knows why - I resisted well past midnight, well past the ghosts of our own past had been put to bed in a drunken stupor. I relented in the end even though I didn’t want to; I relented only because I could, and pulled back because I could. You were the one who realized all those years ago that I wasn’t good enough, after all.