I promise I will...

It's very quiet here now, I got up before Stephanie and mother is out looking for a dress for New Year's, as if she needs another one. I've decided on something flowery from California's best (Juicy Couture) and a plain pearl necklace, simplicity is sadly underrated if you ask me.

Mother keeps pressuring me to come up with a new year's resolution, I know she wants me to get a job but I'm thinking more along the lines of "never (again) sleep with an account manager". At least it's work related, no?

Can you help me out? If you could make me promise anything, what would it be?

We kissed on a corner then danced through the night

How was your Christmas? I celebrated mine in a haze of semi-expensive alcohol and Proenza Schouler, it seemed like the only plausible escape. Chloe went back to California and Stephanie successfully faked a cold to get out of the dinner party I warned her about. So much for gratitude.

Mother's obnoxious friends and their son - the Victoria's Secret fetishist - arrived at exactly 6 pm like I knew they would, I made sure I was still in the shower. Just as I got out, wearing nothing but a towel, Frank showed up unexpectedly (at least to me). He winked at me as I rushed past him into my room, I caught a quick glimpse of his stripe lined Paul Smith overcoat and the milk-white lilies he held behind his back.

Mother uncovered the 15 pound turkey on the table with ill-disguised pride (not that she made it herself of course) and an "abracadaver" instead of the more traditional "ta-dah". A couple of bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau later I called Henry, he graciously agreed to meet me on Lexington and save me from the horror of coming back to discover the mini devil sleeping in my bed.

24 - "Only ignorant people are truly happy"

When someone asks me how I am I usually lie, no one wants to know the truth anyway. I remember moments of happiness (every time Chloe sits next to me on the bed smelling like honeydew in her newest dress), but they're only moments. They're like little bubbles waiting to burst and all I can think of when I'm in them is that nothing lasts forever.

Henry asked me once in the light from hundreds of candles in an apartment in Brooklyn. The power was still out after the storm, we sat under the same blanket in the cold and I said no. I remember the way he held my hand so that no one else could see and he said it was a good thing because only ignorant people are truly happy. Someone next to us started laughing nervously but it wasn't a joke and that's where I am now, that's what I am now.

I've looked myself in the mirror so many times and said "no, I'm not happy", but that only means there is still something to be found in all this darkness. I'm not happy but I know I can be and sometimes that is all it takes and all that really matters.

23 - "I know what this means to you"

The wasteland between us, it's still there after nine months but he's always closer to me than I think I can handle. I remember waking up in my father's car late at night to that song, I thought I smelled gasoline and fresh charcoal but it might just have been a dream.

When I needed to get away I would call Carl and he would pick me up outside our house. I would sit in the backseat and watch him in the rear view mirror, his eyes would glow like fireflies in the dark. Sometimes I would ask him to bring that CD, he never asked any questions.

When I moved to New York he sent me a letter, it took me two weeks to open it and when I did I found a quote from a song about living forever and his own words in the blackest of ink: "I know what this means to you."

22 - "I knew your father"

Even as I stood with my back to her I could feel her watching me, the woman dressed in black on the other side of the room. Mother had taken me to one of her parties in a grandiose apartment on Park Avenue, one of the sort I keep dreaming about (literarily).

I tried not to look but my curiosity got the better of me. She sat there alone, close to the bar, all the other women swarmed around rich looking men dressed in tailored suits holding filled up whiskey glasses. I went up to her and asked her if she knew me. "No" she said, "but I knew your father". My heart stopped for what felt like more than a minute, I had always thought I was the only one.

She looked around the room and for a second I thought I saw a glimpse of contempt in her jade green eyes before she came back to me and smiled crookedly: "we all did."

21 - "I'm here"

"Are you coming for me?" she asked when she called and woke me up that morning. I didn't know, I got up in a daze, put on the first clothes I found (my only Diane von Furstenberg dress and a leather jacket) and grabbed a taxi down on Fifth. Lincoln Tunnel never seemed so endless, my heart in a violent uproar all the way to the airport.

I stumbled through the terminal building as if in high heels on the ice in Central Park and melted the moment I saw her through the crowds. Her slender body on my bed an hour later, me touching her hair periodically just to see if she's really there, and she was. She escaped just like me but we both know we'll never really get out of this dark.

20 - "He loves you"

We never talk about Carl, me and Chloe. I sometimes remember why I left Los Angeles and went to New York and why there's a wasteland between us now. He held her little doll hand in his on the other side of the window and when we talked I yelled at him.

She came after me, maybe for the same reason I escaped. She called me once before, we didn't say much. The letter Carl had sent me was still unopened, I was afraid to read what he had to say. I heard her breathing from miles away, her heartbeats like butterfly wings through the wires. "He loves you" she said and the spell was broken. We never talk about it now and I have so much left to ask her.

19 - "Happy birthday my flower"

My birthday coincides with fall but that only had a meaning in fairytales when I was little. All I knew was the constant 75 degree season that Los Angeles is forever trapped in, it's very different in New York with the cold winds that sometimes feel like cleansing tonic.

My father always called me princess or angel, Carl called me flower. Every year he remembered my birthday, he would call and when I picked up he would say "happy birthday my flower". Then came that summer and the calls stopped, I only heard about him from friends for more than five years. Five years without him and five birthdays without his voice in my ear.

This spring he fell in love with Chloe and she fell in love with him. Something happened to them - I never asked what - and she moved here to be with me. When the fall came I thought about him and counted the days, he called me and I picked up and he said "happy birthday my flower", just like I wished he would.

18 - "Are those Victoria's Secret?"

I can't stress this enough: I hate Abercrombie & Fitch. They are to fashion what Coldplay are to British rock music - a violation and an insult.

I spent last New Year's with mother and her friends in their house in the outskirts of Los Angeles, they have a dorky son (the bad sort of dorky) who's always had a crush on me. Just as I thought we were going home mother told me we were spending the night, me in the son's room of course. I wore a fantastic YSL dress and decided not to ruin it by sleeping in it. "You can borrow something from me" the son said, when I came back out in a much too short A&F T-shirt the first thing he asked me was "are those Victoria's Secret?"

As if the notion of spending the night in his room wearing the enemy's clothes wasn't enough, he thought it would be a good idea to start a discussion about my panties. I've never felt more embarrassed in my life (and no, they were Marlies Dekkers).

17 - "All happy families are alike"

When mother said she had hired someone to "help out around the house" I knew she was sugarcoating. It turned out to be a 200 pound Mexican pack of muscles called Hernan, he never did much to help but she paid for his new car and they slow danced to Claire de Lune - it looked like a plane crash.

"You don't make her happy" I said to him once when we were alone. "All happy families are alike" he replied, "but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". He quoted one of my favorite books and left me lost for words. Shortly after that he stopped coming around, mother was heartbroken for a week and never mentioned him again.

16 - "You taste like revolution"

It was an unusually dark and cold February that year, I sat on mother's bed the night before a party, looking at that picture of my grandfather. The snow drowns out most of the background, it looks the way poverty and oppression must feel like.

I guess it was the first time I saw that little hint of fear in his eyes, somehow it inspired me, I told my guests to dress up in fur hats and military clothing, Miri came in a beautiful black velvet jacket with silver buttons and fringed epaulets. We were alone in my room in the dark and she unbuttoned it, underneath she wore a black crystal embroidered balconette bra (Stella McCartney - I asked) and she kissed me.

When she left around 4.30 in the morning she pulled me close and whispered "you taste like revolution" in my ear. It was probably mother's Pinot Noir, but right there and then I was ready to give up men for good.

15 - "Enchantée"

John Galliano took my hand in his at a party once and kissed it with those luscious North African lips. When they fired him from Dior I cried for a week (true story). He said some stupid things, but to me that first haute couture show they did without him was a crime ten times bigger.

14 - "I always thought we'd die together"

When I first met Carl again after that awful night it was as if nothing had changed. He looked just the way I remembered him and we talked about the same things we had always talked about. Still there was so much I wanted to ask him but never did and maybe it was for the best.

He's never mentioned that summer and that house, what I did to him and how it tore us apart. I don't know how he forgave me and I'm afraid to ask, so we talk about everything else instead. "I was so stupid back then" he said once over coffee. "Do you remember how I told you I thought we'd die together. I really did".

And that was it. I looked at him and he looked out the window, we were silent for minutes together before he started talking about something else and I didn't hear a word he said. It was dark outside, we hugged and I watched him walk away and when he turned the corner I collapsed on the sidewalk. Someone carried me home, I woke up in my bed after a dream about fires.