B’Day

I am the birthday girl. You’d think by now, I’d have dealt with the fact that I’m bound by folklore and literature to share with Jesus. You’d be wrong.

Everyone else sits on one side of the room, facing the television. I sit opposite them on a sofa, behind the screen so I can’t see it, petting the cat. It might be a metaphor (or several). It’s certainly part language barrier. Part of it is my general lack of conformity and angst about mass media. But it has nothing to do with love.

What’s wrong?
Just the impending gloom of half a day spent on the wishes of others, when all I wanted was twenty four hours to myself.

Last year, the adults (since I apparently, in comparison, will never be one) left a cake on the counter on their way out the door. This year, I stay up late listening to Dosh, reading about music I somehow missed this year, wondering how I’ll get through tomorrow without crying amongst people who really do want the best for me. Mostly, I fear the certain spectacle because I know I’ll never be able to explain myself. One more freaky thing the new girl did.

This is a birthday pony
This is a strange kind of rest
Because I feel like a guest when I’m right here at home
I’m not right here at home.

One of my good friends is in a city of her own this year, no friends or family nearby. I wonder if being alone is actually worse than being alone with everyone around you. I feel defective because no matter how surrounded or solitary I am, I am hideously miserable this time of year, bombarded by the expectations of others, both real and perceived. How do I come to terms with this despair, my own personal Weltschmerz that is so deeply manifest around the winter holidays? I have a hard enough time dealing with it on a regular weekday.

And so, it doesn’t seem appropriate to explain how sometimes, in the dead of the night, Andreas will roll over, open his eyes, and say, “I love you,” as if love never existed before. Then he promptly throws an arm over me and falls asleep again. But does it explain our humanity, how comfortable life in love really is, even when you’re a sad soul like myself? I assume most people aren’t this happy and sad, somehow making the two live side by side. Even in my constant state of discontent, I am quite lucky.

Does love insulate me from the rest of the world? It only makes the bumps in the road more tolerable. I know I have an ally. Aside from maybe half a dozen friends over time, I’ve never believed in this kind of acceptance. I battle the privilege of it all most days, trying to overcome the feelings of our world’s collective loneliness while my own ebbs and flows.

For my trouble, for surviving one more year, I’ll be receiving Pig 05049, the most sought after book on my wish list. This year was certainly about survival, as is every one of them, but it was also perhaps the best I have known. I assume it gets harder to quantify these things the older you get. How do you take stock when so much happens?

Yet I’m into looking towards our five year mark, to see where we’ve made it, what’s next. Maybe love is easier to measure than sadness. The more settled into myself and ourselves I get, the more I meet happy, functional couples. What a lie my childhood was, the myth that “love” was imprisonment and sure misery.

What’s our secret? Is it one of success or does it exist because we so value our privacy in certain ways? I’m just doing my best to be honest about what I can, and anyone who has ever really tried to know us understands the truth.