The Guilt of New Year's Eve | Rather than a shop with a line, the usual classic ✨

I am not good at waiting. There is a ramen shop in my neighborhood that always has a line whenever I see it. Day or night, in the heat of summer or the dead of winter, and even on New Year's Eve, people stand silently in front of the shop. That is no longer a meal; it is an ascetic practice performed under the cold sky. Every time I pass by, I think, "I'll go if it's empty," but I have never once seen it empty. Perhaps that shop is not preparing customers, but the line itself.

On New Year's Eve, that line stretched out as usual. While the rest of the world was heading toward year-crossing soba, I searched for a different shop on my smartphone. "Thirty minutes by bicycle." It is a distance I would normally give up on, but thirty minutes of waiting and thirty minutes of pedaling are completely different. The former causes the soul to stagnate, while the latter moves the story forward. I pedaled my bicycle out into the cold sky. The year-end wind was unusually biting, whispering near my ears, "Is ramen really worth going that far for?"

When I arrived at the shop and sat down, I ordered my usual bowl without hesitation. The steam was modest, but when I submerged my spoon, a quiet monster rose up from the bottom. As I took a sip of the soup, it settled heavily on my tongue. There was no lightness. There was no flashiness. There was simply an inescapable deliciousness. When I lifted the noodles, the soup clung to them, and halfway through, the boundary between whether I was eating noodles or soup became blurred. This was no longer just ramen; it was a year-end adjustment submitted to my stomach. I felt as if I were dissolving all the unnecessary emotions of this past year into the thick soup.

A ramen shop I want to visit again is one where I can drink the soup to the very last drop. The numbers from my health checkup were flashing warning lights in the corner of my mind, but it would be boorish to worry about such trivial things on New Year's Eve. Written on the bottom of the bowl were the words, "I'll be waiting for you tomorrow, too." Even after the new year begins, the shop will be waiting. The line will be waiting, too.

As someone who is not good at waiting, I will likely escape on my bicycle again. This is my year-crossing soba. It was a year that was not thin and long, but thick and heavy, where I was caught up in the soup until the very end.

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