Last Entry of the Year: What I Kept

New Year's Eve. The Fremantle Doctor came in at three o'clock as usual, cooling the whole port down, and the cappuccino strip is already filling up with people in their good shirts. I'm not working tonight. I haven't worked a New Year's Eve in six years. Instead I'm sitting at my kitchen table with this year's diary, a bowl of cherries and a cold glass of sparkling water, doing the thing I do every year: reading back through, and deciding what to keep.

The keeping list

Every year I write down a handful of moments that I want to take with me into the next. Not the biggest or the most dramatic. Just the ones that still glow a little when I reread them.

• February. The client who arrived with a bag of homegrown tomatoes and apologised because "they're a bit ugly." They were the best tomatoes I've ever eaten.
• April. The rainy Tuesday I cancelled everything and spent the day at the maritime museum, alone and completely content.
• June. Saying no to a very persistent, very rude man on the phone, calmly, and then blocking his number and going for a walk on the beach. I felt ten feet tall.
• August. A three-hour booking where we spent the first hour doing a jigsaw puzzle of a lighthouse, because he said it helped him relax. It helped me too.
• October. My first week off without checking the work phone once.
• November. The regular who told me I'd helped him feel confident enough to go on a real date. He's still seeing her. He sent a thank-you card with a pressed wildflower in it.

What I'm leaving behind

The habit of apologising for my rates. The habit of taking late bookings when I'm exhausted. The voice that says I should be doing something more respectable. I've done this work for eleven years with care and integrity, and I don't owe anyone an apology for that.

Midnight

I can hear the fireworks starting down at the harbour and the cheering from the pubs along the strip. I'll wander down there soon and watch from the wall, anonymous among the crowd, the way I like it.

Next year I'll keep the diary again. I'll write down the tulips and the tomatoes and the thank-you cards. I'll write down the hard nights too, because they matter. And at the end of it I'll sit here again, and choose what to keep.