Last week I turned 26. Last week I woke up on time, took a long shower, and picked out one of my favorite outfits. Last week I was thrilled at the prospect of another birthday.
Then I got a text from my brother Kai telling me that he and his wife Emily had landed, and that I was going to be an hour late picking him up from the airport. Then, on the drive up I ran out of gas and had to calculate just how much gas I could afford before payday. Then Kai, who was frankly pissed off, told me I needed to take him and his new bride not home, but to our aunt and uncle’s house in the opposite direction. Then I had to sit and wait for them to figure out the logistics of moving a mattress, all the while starving and rubbing at my makeup-less eyes. Then I drove us all home, with the promise that at least that night, dinner with my siblings, presents and games, would be better.
Then I got home and my youngest brother, Jarod, who’d been staying with me since Christmas, left to help move the mattress. I was alone.
It was about then that my mom called to wish me a “Happy Birthday”.
It was nice, talking to my mom, rejuvenating. When I told her that I hadn’t gotten a birthday cake, or really even thought of one, she scolded me gently. “You have to have a cake!” When I told her I wasn’t sure I could afford one she sent me the money to go out and buy myself a cake. And, of course, ice cream.
So, I drove to the grocery store, picked out a pre-decorated cake, talked to some old coworkers, and went home with a quart of my favorite ice cream. It was going to be better.
Still, I couldn’t help but think, “Why was Mom the only one who thought to buy me a cake? She’s not even here.”
But I tried not to fixate on that.
After what was supposed to be a short nap turned into two hours passed out on the couch, Jarod got back. He roused me and we started getting ready to go to dinner.
Originally the plan had been that all of my siblings, Kai, Emily, Jarod my sister Korana and her husband Harrison, would meet at my place before dinner. We’d play a game or two, then drive over together.
Then Kai asked if he and Emily could just meet us at the restaurant. Shortly after, Korana called asking the same thing.
So, when the time came Jarod and I drove to Olive Garden alone.
But as we walked up to the table I was greeted with bright smiles and a chorus of happy birthdays. It was going to be better.
Then we started discussing our plans – what games we might play, the cake and ice cream I’d bought, and the weather outside that was going to make the drive back to my apartment a little tricky, when Korana interrupted me.
“I think we should go to Kai’s place. It’d just be easier since we’re spending the night there anyway. And I could put Conley to bed earlier. It just makes sense.”
But I’d left all my board games at home. I’d left all my presents at home. I’d left the cake and the ice cream at home. And Kai and Emily didn’t even have a fucking couch. But that didn’t matter because it was easier for everyone else. It just made sense for everyone else.
So I drove home in the sleet and snow, packed my car full of wrapped boxes, games, and goods, and trekked back down to Provo into the most maze-like apartment complex I have ever been to.
Why did I have to transport my own presents? Because they weren’t just mine. I had Christmas presents to, and from, my siblings. I had presents for my niece. I had a giant box full of presents and dammit it took a minute to fit them in there.
But Kai and Harrison came out to help me unload the car. I had my presents, my cake, ice cream, and family. It was going to get better.
And for a minute it was. We exchanged sibling presents, my sister loved the tumbler I bought her, and my brother-in-law came in clutch for the second year in a row gifting me a card game I’d wanted for years and the perfect expansion packs. I got to watch my niece, who’s one and a half, open presents with the joy and vigor of a kid three times her age. And I got to open my presents, from siblings and parents alike.. For a minute I got to bask in that love.
But, as it turns out, Emily and Kai didn’t have any silverware. And I’d left the candles at home. And a round or two of games later Conley (and Kai) were ready for bed.
So Jarod and I went home with an uncut cake and went to sleep.
The next day I had the opening shift and got to work with a lovely little redhead we all call Levie (like the jeans). About twenty minutes after we got in, having finished most of our duties, she said she was hungry and I, like the gentleman I am, offered to buy us breakfast. She enthusiastically told me she loved me, and we got McDonald’s. (I set aside money for eating out because if I didn’t, I would never eat. But I don’t have to justify my spending habits to you. Leave me alone.)
After we finished, plowing through breakfast sandwiches, pancakes, and hasbrowns, she turned to me, and with a small frown on her face said, “Is it just me, or was that wildly unsatisfying?”
I couldn’t help but think of the day before.
But I had hope. My friends were throwing me a small party on Thursday. It was going to get better.
And it did. Thursday was great. My friends covered my floor in red and blue balloons. They bought me thoughtful and wonderful gifts. Their roasts made me laugh. Their toasts almost made me cry. And they made me a cake.
Ian and Jeffrey literally made me a cake. They drizzled it in chocolate and put Sodalicious cookies on top. Then they covered it in candles and sang me Happy Birthday.
I blew out all the candles in one go, and for a second, I was proud.
And then I realized I forgot to make a wish. My heart dropped to my stomach. The last time I forgot to make a wish, the year I turned twenty-four and forgot to even blow out candles, I ended up in quarantine a month after moving from Layton to Orem with the sole intent of seeing my friends more. It wasn’t a good year.
But things are going to get better. Right? Because things always get a little better.
Before they fall off again.
Last week I turned 26, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
I keep thinking about health insurance and age brackets, marriage and children, career and everything I thought I’d be. I keep thinking about not being twenty-five anymore.
I’m older than all the characters in my favorite books. I’m older than my parents when I was born. I’m older than all my idols when they broke their molds. I am older than I ever thought I’d be.
At 26 I find myself wildly unsatisfied.
I think that people expected as I got older my birthday would start to mean less to me, the way it did for them, the way all holidays had. I think people expected me to grow up.
Because no other 26-year-old feels like there is magic in the air at Christmas. None of them care to dress up for Halloween. Valentine’s Day becomes Single Awareness day and the 4th of July just a celebration of dangerous nationalism. New Year’s is hated and Easter is boring. By 26 no one is celebrating anymore.
Especially not birthdays.
But I love holidays. I love my birthday – it’s my favorite holiday. It’s my favorite day of the whole year.
Which could be the problem. I could be putting too much pressure on a single day, especially a day halfway between Christmas and New Year’s. It could be too much weight for a day that, for the rest of the world, exists outside the laws of space and time.
Maybe I’m just asking too much for that one day of the year to be the one where my needy ass gets all the attention I want. Maybe it’s too much to ask for that at all.
There’s a song by Bleachers that I play every now and again when I’m feeling nostalgic called “I Miss Those Days”. It’s pretty simple, the chorus just goes “I know I was lost, but I miss those days.”
That line always made me feel like maybe I was too young to love the song the way I did. What days did I have to miss at 24? And more so, why would I miss the days I was lost? Why would I want to go back to being in the closet like I was at 23, or undiagnosed like I was at 21? Why would I want to be the me that I used to be? She was a mess. She was all over the place. She was lost.
Now though? I’ve never been happier. I’ve never been more stable. Finally, I am settled.
But I think I get that song now.
Maybe I miss living with my grandparents. Maybe I miss being thin. Maybe I miss feeling stuck, but safe.
Maybe, just maybe, I miss the tiny apartment with the four roommates I hoped would always be my best friends. Maybe I miss the closet – the certainty of where I was going and who I wanted. Maybe I miss the manic episodes – the reckless behavior, impulsive decisions, and delusions of grandeur. Maybe I miss all the delusions – believing I was straight, believing I was healthy, believing in forever.
Maybe I miss being so in love it consumed me. Maybe I miss my friends, the little adventures and someone to talk to. Maybe I miss my family.
About a year ago I heard someone say, “One day your parents picked you up, put you down, and then never picked you up again.”
Most things don’t end with fireworks and fanfare. Most things don’t go out with a bang. Even those that do leave some sort of echo or fizzle in their wake that slowly peters out into nothingness. Most things settle.
Most things end quietly. Most things slip out of our fingers when we’re not looking and we forget we’re even holding them. Most things we set down once and never pick up again.
I haven’t watched a lot of new TV in the last year and a half. I haven’t read new books or even written much. I haven’t given my ADHD ass anything new to hyperfixate on.
Because I’m in love and I don’t want to fall out of it again.
I don’t want to look back on the book I’ve written or my new favorite TV show as something I used to love. I don’t want to forget this feeling.
And I don’t want to fall out of love with my birthday.
One day Christmas just wasn’t magic anymore. Childhood died in baby steps, one thing disappearing after another. One day your mom stopped tying your shoes. One day your dad stopped carrying your sleeping form from the car to your bed. One day your childhood best friend stopped calling and you stopped playing tag at recess.
One day it went from “Can I play with Suzie?” to “Can I hang out with Suzie?” And that distinction is important.
There’s a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay that lives in my mind rent free, and it’s moments like this that I hear the first lines play in my head.
“Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age The child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.”
I read this poem today, in its entirety, and honestly, it just worse.
Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.
Nobody that matters, that is. Distant relatives of course
Die, whom one never has seen or has seen for an hour,
And they gave one candy in a pink-and-green stripéd bag, or a jack-knife,
And went away, and cannot really be said to have lived at all.
And cats die. They lie on the floor and lash their tails,
And their reticent fur is suddenly all in motion
With fleas that one never knew were there,
Polished and brown, knowing all there is to know,
Trekking off into the living world.
You fetch a shoe-box, but it's much too small, because she won't curl up now:
So you find a bigger box, and bury her in the yard, and weep.
But you do not wake up a month from then, two months
A year from then, two years, in the middle of the night
And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say Oh, God! Oh, God!
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters,
—mothers and fathers don't die.
And if you have said, "For heaven's sake, must you always be kissing a person?"
Or, "I do wish to gracious you'd stop tapping on the window with your thimble!"
Tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow if you're busy having fun,
Is plenty of time to say, "I'm sorry, mother."
To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,
who neither listen nor speak;
Who do not drink their tea, though they always said
Tea was such a comfort.
Run down into the cellar and bring up the last jar of raspberries;
they are not tempted.
Flatter them, ask them what was it they said exactly
That time, to the bishop, or to the overseer, or to Mrs. Mason;
They are not taken in.
Shout at them, get red in the face, rise,
Drag them up out of their chairs by their stiff shoulders and shake
them and yell at them;
They are not startled, they are not even embarrassed; they slide
back into their chairs.
Your tea is cold now.
You drink it standing up,
And leave the house.
I don’t want to be grown. I don’t want to die.
And maybe there are some endings that are not death, but rather metamorphosis. Maybe some endings are worth it.
Manic episodes are dangerous, the closet is lonely. But summers were vivid and religion was easy. There was freedom in the confusion and the chaos. There was liberation in not knowing.
There was magic in Christmas and unbridled joy in my birthday.
And now I’m unsatisfied. But am I unsatisfied because others have died, or because I am slowly dying?
I want to be tempted by raspberries and taken in by flattery. I want to be startled and angry and hurt and feeling. I want to live in the kingdom where nobody dies.
But my tea is growing cold, the shoulders I’ve shaken lie limp against chairs, and I don’t want to live alone.
That’s how I felt driving my brother home from the airport – alone. That’s how I felt sitting in my aunt’s kitchen waiting on birthday wishes that had been forgotten. That’s how I felt shopping for a birthday cake while my brother was off moving a mattress. It’s how I felt driving back to my house after dinner to pack up presents and driving home with uneaten cake and ice cream.
It’s how I felt when nobody realized I wanted to cry.
I think I’ve felt this way my whole life. There have been moments where I could set the feeling down, moments where I felt my soul gripping hands with another, but they’ve been moments rather than a refrain, glimpses rather than the full picture. Most of the time I’m lonely.
I think that may be my fault though.
I think I push people away. I keep them at arm’s length, and when I do let them closer it’s just for a moment. I think I’m so afraid of how comfortable everyone else is with the end of love I choose not to let them love me at all. I don’t tell them that I need more, that I want more, because I am afraid of the dangers of more.
I am terrified of sitting at a table with someone who has died and cannot be roused by my smile.
So tonight, I’m blowing out candles on a week-old cake, alone. And it will be wildly unsatisfying.