What our wishes for 2022 tell us: A letter from Times Square
Sophie Belcher, from Britain, shows off her engagement ring shortly after her boyfriend, Simon Floyd, proposed to her. His 2022 wish is for a happy marriage. She also wished for their puppy to have a long and happy life. Visitors to Times Square in New York can write down their wishes for 2022 on pieces of paper that will be used as confetti on New Year's Eve.
Stephen Humphries/The Christian Science Monitor
New York
In Times Square, the longest line isn’t for the discount Broadway show ticket booth. Nor is it for photo opps with the costumed Mickeys and Minnies milling about like theme park escapees. The big queue is for a booth where one can write wishes for 2022 on small squares of multi-colored paper. On New Year’s Eve, just after the ball drops at midnight, the wish lists will be blasted into the air as confetti. I imagine it’ll look like an explosion at a Post-it note factory.
I’ve journeyed here from Boston to see what people’s wishes reveal about hopes and aspirations for 2022. Many of the notes, pinned to a board, express a wish for the pandemic to end. (Days after my visit, some tourist attractions shut down due to concerns about the Omicron COVID-19 variant, and conditions around Broadway and the New Year’s Eve party in Times Square are fluid.) But a closer look at the individual wishes reveals a rich picture of day-to-day lives – including reminders that genuine happiness can flourish in hard times.
Take, for instance, the note that Simon Floyd from Britain scrawled just after proposing to his girlfriend, Sophie Belcher.
Why We Wrote This
When a new year rolls around in the calendar, wishes and goals are a window to society at large. Our reporter finds love high on people’s lists, along with ending the pandemic.
“I wish that Sophie – my fiancée – and I have a happy wedding and a happy marriage,” says Mr. Floyd. Her engagement ring is almost as dazzling as the mega screens in Times Square that create a daylight-like luminescence long after sunset.
Despite the cold, people patiently wait in line like voters about to cast ballots to elect a better 2022. Many express gratitude for the good they’ve experienced in 2021. Massage therapist Victoria Fishman is exultant about landing a new job after the pandemic shut down her industry. Rebecca Cornell of Long Island reunited with her grandparents after not being able to see them for a year-and-a-half. “We cried,” says Ms. Cornell, who wished for a wonderful wedding ceremony on New Year’s Eve 2022.
Nicole Britt and Wayne White from Tennessee are grateful to have met during the pandemic. They’re getting married in May. He wished for a baby. “We’ll have to see about that,” his wife-to-be laughs.
Joyce Armigos, a coordinator at the wishing booth, has seen it all. Perhaps not surprising, since an estimated 12,000 messages land each day. Someone wished for $800 million. Another had a single-word wish – pizza. Then there are the notes that touched her deeply, like when a child wrote, “I wish my dad didn’t drink a lot.”
Many wishes are for “health and happiness.” Others express a longing to fall in love.
“We love the idea of having a wish because we feel like if it comes true, that it means that we’re here, that what we say does matter, and we do matter,” says Ms. Armigos.
Multiple languages show up in the notes. Libbis Perdigon from Venezuela wished for freedom for her nation. Oleksii Sviliashchuk from Kyiv expresses concern about Russian troops massing on the Ukraine border.
“I feel fear when I think that I could be in war,” says Mr. Sviliashchuk. “And that’s why I think that peace is the main thing that I can wish for.”
Many visitors to the booth are grateful to travel more freely now. In the evening rush hour, New Yorkers speed walk past lollygagging out-of-towners. A refrain from a Simon and Garfunkel song starts playing in my mental jukebox: “They’ve all come to look for America.”
“New York to me, is sort of the heart of America,” says travel tour manager Barbara Palmer, who wished that she and her mother could safely relocate to Connecticut next year after spending the pandemic in Florida. “No offense to the heartland of America – because it’s different – but because [New York] is that collection of different cultures, collection of different peoples, collection of different beliefs that, for better or worse, survive together. When New York is doing well, [everything] thrives together.”
Several New Yorkers mention that Times Square was deserted earlier this year. They’re elated to see it bustling again.
When it’s finally my turn at the booth, I wonder what to write on my slip of paper. Then I recall a simple wish that Ms. Armigos, the coordinator, told me had touched her heart: “I just want to have a better tomorrow.”
People from around the world can submit their 2022 wishes, to be added to the confetti in Times Square, at this webpage: https://www.timessquarenyc.org/whats-happening/nye-wishing-wall.