We Don’t Share a Birthday
In the weeks leading up to my birthday, I think I see you everywhere. I walk past a bus stop that smells like a bowling alley, and I can’t get you out of my mind where the thundering balls and pins and thoughts crash and get swept away. I try to sweep you away too.
I suppose it’s lucky your birthday is two days after mine, because if you don’t break the silence, I won’t either. If you send me a message, I will respond with warmth and I’ll wish you a happy birthday as well, so as not to draw it out over the whole weekend, waiting for the actual day. We won’t speak after that, but we will ghost each other’s dreams and torture one another in that languid, foggy limbo between sweet sleep and excruciating consciousness.
Last night I dreamt you into a house with my family, and you sat on the couch talking with all of us. I was admiring your profile as you spoke, counting the freckles on one side of your face and smiling so hard that I woke myself up. When I am awake, I remember parking lot blizzards and dimly lit restaurants and movies in the basement, but I realize this morning that I’ve forgotten the hours I spent sitting on the floor just gazing and grinning.
Three years ago, we exchanged gifts on the same day. You’d dragged my best friend with you to the mall to ensure you picked out something I would like. Both pairs of earrings broke by the time our relationship was over. They were beautiful, but not as beautiful as the letter you wrote. I still have the sweater. Mom bought us tickets to a concert at the college next to my house, and I wore the scarf from your sister.
Two years ago, Mom called and told me she’d sent you a birthday card. I cried so much. I think I texted you too, to wish you well. Maybe you had done the same for me but I don’t remember and I’ve finally deleted the messages. Celebrating without you was skeletal; the support was thin and creaking. It lacked substance. My new friends had met me only months earlier. They couldn’t write letters to bring me to tears, to put muscle on the bone.
One year ago, my favorite song lulled me through nights where I would clutch my stomach and stare dramatically out the window and miss you and miss you and miss you — “we don’t share a birthday, we do share a sign/and we shared something or was it in my mind?”
We turn twenty this year, which is probably more significant than I’d like to consider. But I am a writer, so I consider it now. We will never again be teen lovers, and any decision we make from this point forward is an adult decision, laced with the implication of responsibility, the gravity of permanence, and the possibility of settling.
People make a big deal of twenty despite the lack of legal changes that follow this birthday. As far as I can tell, it’s more like a 365-day countdown to legal drinking. I am in Europe, though, so this doesn’t apply. I imagine us next Friday night, two glasses of wine into the evening, two glasses of wine into forgetting, drunk in different time zones. Our fingers grazing keyboards and never pressing “send”.
But I am a writer, so this is poetry and I write about it now. Here is my birthday message to you.
Happy twentieth. I hope you are well, or at least that you’re better. I hope you are excited for twenty-one and twenty-two and so on, and that you still think the unknown is thrilling rather than crippling. I am learning you were right about that (thank you).
In anthropology we are learning about gift-giving. The politics of the relationship you create when you give, the disguised superiority of the giver when the gift is left unreciprocated, the obligation to return the favor as a way of preserving a social relationship. What social relationship do we have left to salvage? Am I lying if I say I don’t expect a response?
I don’t expect a response. I don’t expect you to read this let alone know how to find it. I don’t imagine you seek out my words anymore; I don’t give myself that much credit. If this piece were skywriting, I would imagine you walking with your head down. My words are not written in the pavement’s cracks; there is only forgetting, step by step.
Like what you just read? Please hit the ‘recommend’ button and subscribe to our digital magazine about creativity and beyond, Inklings.
