The New Year Cold That Haunts Me

On the final night of the year, memory freezes time; where prison cold, broken promises, and unresolved grief remind us why forgetting is a luxury we can’t afford.

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Michael Cohen arrives at the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, New York, U.S., May 6, 2019. REUTERS/Mike Segar

The last day of the year always lies to us a little.

It pretends to be a finish line, a clean edge where we can neatly stack our accomplishments on one side and our failures on the other. It suggests closure. Resolution. Finality. But for many of us—especially in 2025—there is no neat accounting. There is only survival. There is only endurance. There is only the quiet question we carry into tomorrow: Can I do this again?

Tomorrow, the year ahead is unwritten. Unknown. And that unknown doesn’t feel hopeful to a country that has spent the past year bruised—politically battered, economically stretched, emotionally exhausted. Fear, in moments like this, is not weakness. It is honesty. It is the body remembering what the mind wishes it could forget.

I know something about that; sadly, all too well.

No matter how hard I try, the memories do not fade. They do not soften. They do not retreat into some dusty corner of the past. They haunt the mind. They torment the heart. They terrorize the soul. And on nights like this, when the world counts down and pretends joy is mandatory, they return with precision and cruelty.

I am thinking about the New Year I spent at FCI Otisville. Away from my wife. Away from my daughter. Away from my son. Away from my extended family and friends. The first time in 27 years that midnight arrived without shared wishes, shared kisses, shared hope whispered into another human being’s ear.

For a long time, I believed I was alone in that pain. I carried it quietly, like contraband, only sharing it with my wife when it became too heavy to hold. But yesterday, that illusion cracked. I met up with an old friend from Otisville—someone I hadn’t seen since I walked out five years ago. And suddenly, the past wasn’t past anymore.

We talked about New Year’s Eve 2020. About “the boyz.” About how we didn’t celebrate the arrival of 2021; we accepted it. That distinction matters. Celebration requires hope. Acceptance is what you do when hope feels reckless.

We set up tables in the chow area. Everyone brought what they could—snacks, drinks, bits of food saved and traded like currency. Televisions flickered with images of Times Square, of fireworks exploding over cities we might as well have been watching from another planet. The building was ice cold. Brutally so. It was a Butler Building—metal frame, aluminum siding, zero insulation, over forty years old and warped by time and neglect.

The double doors didn’t meet their frames. Four doors. North, South, East, and West. Gaps of one to two inches along the bottom and sides, funneling winter air straight inside. The heating system barely functioned—until I asked two decent correctional officers I worked for in the Pipe Shop to help. C.O. Diamond could fix anything. C.O. Massey was a licensed electrician. Together, we got it running. But heat can’t compete with a wind tunnel.

So I did what desperation always demands: I improvised. Gorilla tape from the shop. Sealed the gaps. For one night—just one—the temperature wasn’t forty-two degrees on our beds. It was tolerable. Not comfortable. Not humane. Just tolerable.

Normally, we slept layered like refugees. Two pairs of socks. Thermals under sweatpants under work pants. Thermal shirt under a T-shirt under a sweater under a winter jacket. Gloves. Hat. If you were lucky—if you were connected—you had three blankets, each so thin that you’d need thirty to feel safe.

The next morning, C.O. DeLeo ordered the tape removed. Fire hazard, he said. Doors sealed, he claimed. Logic meant nothing. That the doors swung outward. That tape wouldn’t stop them from opening. That the building was metal and concrete and there was nothing to burn. Needs escaped him. Humanity escaped him. Remove it or go to the SHU; a/k/a: the hole.

So I complied.

That night, dressed in identical green, we waited for the year to arrive. Then we lined up for the phones. I called my wife. She answered. I heard the sadness in her voice—the same sadness I felt. The first New Year in nearly three decades spent apart. The phones were near the door. Cold air rushing in. Calls had to be brief. Emotional, but controlled. No tears allowed in prison. No privacy permitted.

That cold never really left me. It didn’t leave many of us. Otisville has a way of embedding itself into your bones, into your being, long after your body is free. You carry it into warm rooms. Into quiet moments. Into every night when the calendar flips and the world tells you to celebrate while your soul remembers how to brace.

So as we step into 2026, I’m not interested in performative resolutions or empty mantras whispered at midnight and forgotten by sunrise. I don’t believe in promises designed to dissolve the moment life becomes inconvenient. What I believe in now is harder. Heavier. Necessary.

Resolve to pay attention. To stay politically informed even when it exhausts you. To remain engaged when disengagement feels safer. To be active, vigilant, and unflinchingly present in a country that depends on our short memories to repeat its cruelties. Refuse the comfort of ignorance. Refuse the luxury of looking away.

Because hope is not found in pretending the cold never existed. Hope lives in memory. In discomfort. In the willingness to sit with what hurts and let it change how we show up for one another.

And if the coming year asks anything of us, let it be this: to remember who was left freezing in the dark—and to make damn sure we don’t leave anyone there ever again.

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