In 2014, a friend and I decided to celebrate the New Year in Hawaii. (One of the best decisions of my life.) Our first days were on Oahu Island, where there’s an abundance of activities to do. We visited the Pearl Harbor site, we hiked up Diamond Head (pictures) early to see the sunrise, we biked, we swam, and hell, did we party.

On New Year’s Eve, we met amazing people at the hostel, with whom we partied on the beach and jumped into the seven first waves of the year, as some new Brazilian friends told us it was a tradition from home.

The next day, the first of 2014, we still had enough energy to start the year in big, and we did parasailing for the first time in our lives. Have you ever parasailed? Isn’t it just amazing?

There was this weird moment, though, on the way back to the port, when our guides stopped the boat to have a better look at a black, swollen object on the clear water of the Pacific Ocean. They made a quick, murmured phone call to report it, since they thought it was a corpse.

A corpse. Floating. So near.

That chilly thought horrified me even more when they told us it often happened when there were big parties on the beach, like, for example, New Year’s Eve. Now every December 31, while people make lists of resolutions or think of someone to kiss, I make a silent prayer that nobody gets too drunk in Hawaii and decides to make a midnight dip.

I don’t know what made me think of this today, but this morning I realized that we never got to know if it really was a corpse, after all. I hope it wasn’t.