December 12th was always the hardest day of the year for J.P. to stay 
sober. 

The date had always been extra meaningful to J.P. for three reasons:

1) It was the day he had met Sarah Tobin for the first time. Ten years 
later, she was still the standard that all others had failed to live up 
to.

2) It was the day his estranged father had died, the clock on that 
mortiversary turning five today.

3) It was the year his mother had remarried and essentially exited his 
life, a scant two years ago.

These were the seeds, but as a result of this triple convergence -- any 
one of these might have been the most important moment of his life -- J.P. 
remembered December 12ths the way most people remember Christmas or 
birthdays. He could tell you where he was on any December 12th. For 
instance, in 2005, two years after the death and one year before the 
remarriage of his mother, J.P. went to a diner and ordered a reuben with 
fries. He remembered vividly the awful pink-and-green wallpaper, possibly 
out of the misguided 70s (J.P. had no memory of the 70s, having missed 
being born in them by a few weeks), but more possibly out of a 
drug-induced Easter Bunny hallucination. After all, he thought, 
hallucinations were probably more common than nostalgia in San Francisco.

In 2004, on the one-year anniversary of his father's death, J.P. had reread 
the last letter -- three years before his death -- that his father had mailed 
him. His father had been a Luddite, which J.P. thought amusing in light of his 
own technophilia, but he had to concede that the result was striking, a 
five-page letter outlining his side of th story, the block letters becoming 
more and more frantic as his father (J.P. imagined) had become more and more 
emotional. After his death, when the will was being executed, J.P. had talked 
to his father's widow, who had confirmed that his father did think of him as 
his son, and did so with great feeling. "It was the only thing that he really 
got emotional about," she had said on the telephone, her voice rich with 
overtones as she tried to cling on to this newfound piece of her husband.

The letter itself stressed that he had no right or desire to interfere in 
J.P.'s life. J.P. had never written back to it, and two years or so later 
(the letter was not a December 12th event), he had found out that he would 
never get a chance to. It was a haunting thought in his life; he simply 
didn't know what to say, and never managed to put the words on the paper.

However, his father's death was remarkably unemotional compared to his 
memories of Sarah Tobin. In 2002 -- what would have been their four-year 
anniversary -- he had sat on the couch, ordered Chinese food, and drank a 
bottle of wine while watching an endless marathon of House, a TV show 
about a doctor who also had his own problems with substance abuse. When he 
was done, he picked up the bottle of wine and attempted to hurl it at the 
drywall of his Berkeley apartment, but his dreams of a dramatic shatter 
were eviscerated when the bottle proved stronger than the drywall, leaving 
a bottle-shaped hole in it as it bounced, unharmed, to the floor. For the 
next few months, J.P. saw the hole in the wall whenever he got out of bed, 
a reminder of the cascades of four years ago.

It wasn't that J.P. resented her at all. It wasn't even that he was still 
devastated about their emotional breakup, which certainly qualified as the 
most painful moment of his life. That had happened nearly two years after 
they had gotten together, and five months after their actual breakup; it 
was also an easy date to remember, because it had been on her birthday, 
October 25. J.P. had flown across the country to surprise her, but she had 
not been in love with him any more. It was surprising to J.P., whose 
self-centered view of the world could see no reason for this to have 
transpired -- after all, even three-thousand-miles away and with sparse 
contact, he knew that he was the same person -- and he was stunned, crying 
straight through the weekend. The reverberation from this had shook him 
and perhaps continued to do so to this day; it was, after all, the day 
that his future had collapsed the most.

Nonetheless, it was not October 25 that J.P. took as his day of mourning, 
but December 12th. It wasn't because he missed her (although this was 
undeniably true) or because he was still hung up on her (which was 
debatable, especially by his therapist). It was simply because on December 
12, 1998, he had been an amazing, firing-on-all-cylinders person, at the 
top of his form, in the middle of the happiest day of his life as it 
unfolded. They had walked, tingling, into a pitch-dark room and emerged 
madly in love, stunned that such a happiness could exist and ineffably 
excited about the future, the kind of punch-drunk excitement that no one 
over the age of thirty (J.P. had two years before this arbitrary cutoff 
triggered) could have.

Of course, it didn't hurt the revisionist history that, for most of the 
eighteen months -- every relationship has a few bumps in the road -- this 
future had come to pass.

At any rate, the pain of each December 12th (well, not 1999) was that J.P. 
would look back on this day, and the wistfulness would give way to the 
realization that he was a much, much worse person on this December 12th 
than he had been on that one. He wasn't as funny; he wasn't as exciting; 
he certainly wasn't as in-shape as he was on that winter day. He had 
gained some things, to be sure: somewhat more mature, somewhat more stable 
(although this last parameter varied a lot from month to month and year to 
year), but these were not things that would ever lend themselves to 
December 12th-style happiness. The problem as he saw it was that that sort 
of happiness was inaccessible to him. Part of this was the circumstances, 
not being in the free-form world of college anymore, but part of it was 
that on December 12th, 1998, everything had come together: he was the 
exact right person for the exact right girl in the exact right time and 
place. It was a mixture of serendipity and personal quality that J.P. had 
never achieved again, or come particularly close to achieving.

When December 12th, 2006 rolled around, his mother had gotten married. It 
was a complete coincidence, of course; she would never remember this as a 
date in his life, and he wasn't sure that she ever even knew the date that 
her ex-husband had died on (he had not told her about the letters, and 
when he had tentatively mentioned his death to her a couple of weeks after 
the fact, she had changed the subject quickly). Her husband was an aloof 
Frenchman, and after the wedding she had moved with him to Europe; 
reasonable, he thought, as she had no attachment to the United States. His 
mother was a traveler at heart, after all, who had grown up in Korea, gone 
to graduate school in England (where she met his father), and spent some 
time in Australia before settling down in New York to raise J.P., only to 
move to -- of all places -- Kansas City after he went to college.  J.P. 
understood his mother, and understood why she was swept off her feet by 
the quirky Frenchman, and understood why she resided in Nice.

His relationship with her had been growing more and more distant before 
the wedding, however, and the extra ocean between them was the nail in the 
coffin. J.P. was okay with this -- he saw it as a natural passage of time, 
the weakening of the maternal link -- but on this day, December 12th, it 
gained (as everything did) some extra relevance. It was a lonely day for 
J.P.. In 2007, he had been in a relationship, which, much to his surprise, 
didn't make things any better -- he merely moped around, surly, without 
being able to tell his girlfriend what was going on, and his usual annual 
depression gained a passive-aggressive component to it; they broke up a 
week later. 

And now it was 2008, and there was no mother, no father, no Sarah Tobin 
(who, for her part, he assumed the null hypothesis of December 12th not 
being a day of mourning held, especially because, unlike J.P., she had 
done something with her life and had also en route found, much to her 
surprise, true love), and no one around that J.P. could even take his 
depression out on. He took the Friday off from work and, following his 
tradition, lay aimlessly on the couch chugging chicken wings and staring 
at inane soap operas and daytime talk shows, waiting for the sun to set on 
another day of tragedy. 

The afternoon faded into evening as J.P. waited for the day to end. He 
closed his eyes, but, as always happened, he started thinking, and he 
re-opened them, staring up at the ceiling above his couch, his gaze 
wandering to the clock on the wall. He watched as it held at 11:58 for 
what seemed like an interminable amount of time, then held at 11:59 even 
longer. At last, the clock flipped over to 12:00, and he sighed one last 
sigh, then stood up and walked into the bedroom. He lay in bed, closed his 
eyes, and, much to his relief, instantly fell asleep.