Content warning, sweet friend: if you wish to avoid mentions or discussions of death, I would recommend you skip the 2nd paragraph labeled “Twenty-six” of this piece.
Seven. Every birthday, I had the same kind of cake. My parents would always play through the farce of asking, at least: “You sure you don’t want something new?” I never did. Angel food cake, with store-bought strawberries pushed into the pillowy top, and canned whipped cream. I would tip the can into my mouth, my mother scolding me half-heartedly, until she smiled and I grinned back, clouds dissipating between my teeth.
Eight. The June day of my classroom birthday party (remember when you could do that?), my mood ring got stuck on my finger during read-aloud time. By the time my father arrived with the cake I was in tears, my finger swollen beyond recognition, the ring still oiled and sudsy from the remedies my teacher had tried. There was no party; there was a ride to the local fire department, where a kind and broad-shouldered firefighter sawed off my ring. He gave me a T-shirt “for being brave,” soft and blue-black like the sky from my window, that came down to my knees. I slept in it for weeks. I don’t remember if I had cake at all.
Eleven. It was the first summer my parents spent separated. My mother swept us overseas alone; neither my aunt nor my grandmother spoke of my father at the table. I begged my mother to let me get my ears pierced, not really expecting her to say yes after months. But on one of the hot southern-sea days leading up to my birthday, she finally relented. The posts ached in my ears; every night for the rest of July I rinsed the punctures with saline. Two little wounds I was so proud to carry, to put on display. It took me years to realize my mother probably caved because of my father’s absence: she knew I missed him, and that even stoppered as we were in this homeland capsule, nothing would be the same for me after it. What were a couple of holes punched in my ears to the ones my parents felt they had hollowed out in me?
Seventeen. No time for parties. I was weeks headlong into a music program where I was a local among too many out-of-towners, where I would make no friends because I wasn’t in the dorms. I spent the morning of my birthday parsing solfège intervals in a cramped classroom; no one wished me anything because as far as they knew there wasn’t anything to wish. My boyfriend got me a melodica, and I learnt how much to breathe to keep a note going long enough to reach the next. He broke up with me barely a week later, saying he hadn't wanted to ruin my birthday. He left me sobbing, gasping for air under a big oak tree in the park. I didn’t come out of my room for a week. The melodica has remained unplayed in a closet at my mother’s house ever since.
Twenty-five. I’ve come to think of my birthday as a gathering point, the sultry apex of summer. My favorite people crammed into too small a space, talking and laughing like bubbles in a glass. Lanterns strung on the wall, papery and fragile, the light bouncing off gleaming cheeks and throwing bottles into shadow. On a birthday everyone looks beautiful, not just the person who was born. I wear the nicest dress I have and flit from person to person and revel in the blush. Their love, my love, seeping together, winestains on the carpet. A mess I will not clean up in the morning. A wish I am always making, candleless, for it to always be like this.
Twenty-six. When I wake on my birthday, it is under the sky’s swollen grey belly, the choking threat of storm. My lover tries to get me out of bed and I start crying from how little I slept, and then cry again seeing the balloons he's set up for me. I walk twenty minutes to pick up cake from a nearby shop; sweat slips down my back, around my waist, unwanted touch. It feels like another skin, thin film between me and the world, not protective but motionless. I walk without going anywhere, I go about the day that is supposed to change me without changing. I watch the same show I always watch when I need a layer of static, something to thin out the molasses in my head. Texts and well-wishes filter in over the hours: I try to keep answering them until finally I just stop. I notice that they all say things like, “hope the day is good,” and “sending so much love today.” No one says anything about the year to come. No one wants to talk about what comes next, because no one knows. Least of all me.
Twenty-six. In the week that I am supposed to celebrate a new year of life, I seem be surrounded by — or maybe only able to notice — death. I think about how many people this year will never have a birthday again. How deadly of a year this has been. The news racks up death tolls and murders and tragic accidents like poker chips. Being alive feels like a gamble these days, a horrible joke with no punchline. I think about how many stupid and horrible and unjust and frightening ways there are to die. “I think about that just crossing the street,” my lover remarks when I bring it up. The offhand way he says it makes my arms erupt in gooseflesh. How do you feel about another year? I imagine someone asking me, microphone to my face. At least I’m alive, I’m grateful, the beauty-pageant version of me says, hand to her heart. But something else, feral, stirs in my chest and whimpers, I’m scared every second. Aren’t you?
Twenty-six. I told him all I wanted for my birthday was to see the ocean, so the day after, we wake before six and drive. The plan is to go straight to the beach three hours north — but when we arrive the lots are already full and the strip of shore is choked with bodies. I bite back the panic attack rising in my throat and Google Maps somewhere nearby, anywhere, that might be deserted and open. About an hour later we trudge down a hot dusty trail, reedy grasses swaying on either side. The ocean-roar nears and nears like a homing device between my ribs. I nearly miss it at first: a wood sign, unassuming arrow, reads “Shore Access.” I trip down the path not more than a sandal’s width, and then there I am. My heart catches at the sight of the waves, terrible and foaming, smashing over the rocks to spill over the pebbles at our feet. It isn’t the beach, but I’ve always gotten bored lying on the sand for hours, and this time I would have been at risk. Now I sit on a sun-singed rock with my soles in a salt pool. He kisses my shoulder. The clamor of the tide and the gulls circling is welcome, is chaos. Everything about this feels right: the blue savagery of the sea, the scorching sky, the world so terrifying and so beautiful all at once. Yes, I am alive. I’m grateful. I’m scared every second. Aren’t you?