It was her Birthday. She wasn’t old enough to be considered old, but she didn’t feel young anymore. She was done with school. She had no prospects for work. She was biding time. Her long-term relationship had ended and she was left in the wake of all that she thought she would be by then: a young professional, recently married, settled, and pondering starting a family with her young husband.
She had none of these. She lived with her mother and worked the same job she’d held in high school.
She was not looking forward to this birthday, but she tried to make it into a positive part of her life; considering all of the things she’d done in the past year and all the things she’d learned about herself and the ways of the world. She’d graduated college and moved from the Midwest to the Big Apple where her best friend usurped the job she thought she’d hold at the end of the internship period.
For her birthday, she planned a variety of quirky activities to engage her townie friends. Her other friends were spread all over the world, engaged in various tasks of study or working in some capacity. Her friends at home always complained of boredom, so she devised an itinerary, spanning a week, of out of the box things to do in celebration of a day she would have rather forgotten.
Her wish, as it turned out (and as her excitement to partake in these celebratory activities mounted) was to be granted. Not a single friend she’d invited was able, after a month of having RSVPed “yes” could celebrate. She canceled celebrations and was then met by a round of agitated friends telling her that she simply HAD to do something, so she devised a less involved itinerary and began to look forward to it.
This schedule, too, was abandoned. She caught up on some much needed sleep and picked up more hours at work, looking forward to a dinner with friends on her actual date of birth. The day started out rough. She had a dream about a boyfriend who had been stalking her. This set the tone for the day. One of the flowers her mother had given her was decapitated by her stepfather and shortly after making this discovery, a rack of frozen ribs descended from the freezer onto her foot. That foot had never healed correctly from being broken at a ska concert years before and a spray of angry popped blood vessels reappeared.
Shortly thereafter, foot recovered and breakfasted, she checked her e-mail and was met with an angry missive from her father, with whom she’d been out of contact for nearly a month. He scrawled out all the reasons for why he hated her mother and included a few paragraphs about how she was turning into a horrible person, with a postscript about having withheld some valuable family information. This piqued her interest, but only until one of her best friends sent her a message saying that the girl he had chosen to be his girlfriend disliked her, though they hadn’t spoken a word to each other in over 15 years, and that they would no longer be able to talk.
Trying not to settle on all the bad things that had happened during the morning, she decided to visit another good friend who was working at a nearby coffeehouse. When she arrived at her destination, she was unable to get in, due to a new sidewalk being poured directly outside of the entrance. ”No matter,” she thought, climbing back into the car and heading to a nearby park to do some reading before heading to her afternoon volunteering program. She sat in the car, enjoying the uncharceristically balmy October day and turning the pages of her novel. ”Nothing like good literature to take one’s mind off of things,” she told herself.
The day was warm, and she quickly grew hot in the car with the sun filtering through the windows. She turned the key in the ignition, wanting to get the car on to roll down the window. The car wouldn’t start. She had 20 minutes to get to her volunteer session. She called everyone who was in town, but no one picked up. Just at her moment of panic, her coffeehouse friend called. He would come and jump start her car.
He arrived in a flurry, five minutes later and hurried to attach the jumper cables to just the right notches on each car’s respective battery. He turned his car on. She turned her car on. Nothing happened. They waited. Tried again. Nothing happened. Ten minutes later, she was already late. She started walking.
She arrived late and had no way to leave once she was finished. ”That’s ok,” she thought, “I’ll call a friend.”
She made the call. ”Umm, about tonight… none of us can go anymore. I’m stuck at work. I can’t help you. Sorry,” she was told by the voice at the other end of the line.
She got a ride home from her stepdad who had miraculously been able to repair the car and went home. She was exhausted. She had a dinner of mac ‘n’ cheese with her mother. She needed comfort food. She took a shower and tried to wash away the bad feelings of the day. She climbed into bed and found out that her friends had gone to dinner without her. She pulled on her favorite pajamas and snuggled down into her flannel cloud sheets with a slice of birthday cake. She got the hiccups and couldn’t eat for a good 20 minutes.
She boxed up the memory of the birthday she had planned on celebrating surrounded by good people and put it on the shelf as the birthday of the cowardly companion, discouraging dad, and fleeting friends and stored it next to the birthday her parents picked up and went on vacation to Paris without her, the birthday her mom got mad and threw a cake at her, the birthday she moved and didn’t know anyone and hardly spoke a word all day, and the birthday she spend comforting her bawling ex boyfriend and nearly got run over by a Range Rover. She jammed the boxes of birthday memories into the highest, most unreachable shelf in the library of her mind.
The buildup to this day had long coming, but the letdown was almost immediate. As she ticked one more year off of her life, she felt a little part of her soul escape. It rolled out in the tears she only allowed herself to cry in the shower, so that they’d mix in with the tap water and disappear down the drain into a sewer of oblivion.
