how to wish yourself a happy birthday

wake up before the sun by accident, get a little spooked by a work thing you have to do. do it really quick while everyone is asleep, try to integrate the task into the dream state before blinking twice and realizing the futility of this. the cortisol is high and your body is already arriving to meet your mind. it’s your birthday and you’re the only person alive to witness it right now. the house is still.

put on the layer and then the other one. leave your phone plugged in upstairs and forget that your alarm is set and will wake your boyfriend but that’s not on your mind right now, due to the day. chug up the hill all contrarian — how terrible is it to have a day where you’re supposed to be happy and grateful throughout it all? is everyone else not stressed out by everything that goes wrong on such “a day?” are other people more perfect in their ability to contain celebration, such that inconveniences on a special day simply bounce from their person like water bubbles in a hot pan? it’s just a day, you say to yourself. it’s just a day that you are allowed to enjoy.

gaze into the vague silhouette of the mountains ahead. not smog this time, only fog, and it fills up the street all viscous and joined like a blanket. los angeles is not alive at 6:37 in the morning, and so you take your liberties walking and staring and thinking of the silence and wondering about if you will ever find this feeling in any other city.

it is without ceremony or premeditation when you decide to wish yourself a happy birthday, and in retrospect the time feels so sacred that you wonder if it was given to you as a gift from elsewhere.

you start at the beginning. the baby just born, tan tub in the Cary house, naked and nestled up to the heavy, silver necklaces and Esteé Lauder perfume. you hold the baby and say “happy birthday, honey. i love you.”

the baby toddles along through time, stuffing cake into her mouth in the Nikon flash and wearing overalls with a big button — bangs arrive at around two or three. each time she grows older you stop and envision her in full detail, holding her close, and say “happy birthday, honey. i love you.”

when she is eight you have to stop walking. you turn and tuck into someone else’s driveway like the military, heaving and suddenly blinded with the totality. you picture her exactly right: tankini at the swimming pool, hunched over little fat rolls, hair forming thick ropes in the summer sun. teeth missing. you cry so much and so suddenly that you scare yourself with the sound of the whimper that escapes, with the raw energy that pours out, with the knowledge that she never had to go away forever. with the fact that you are looking kind of insane right now on the street or rather in the stranger’s driveway. but that thought leaves you quickly, leaves you in the room with you and yourself again. “happy birthday, honey. i love you.”

eleven is almost more torturous than eight (and wasn’t it?). i won’t get into it here because that’s for me. “happy birthday, honey. i love you".”

and then you are there on the bathroom tile and in the bathtub run with streaks of blood, all wet and bigger than the teenager, holding her against you and the warmth, knowing she can feel the furnace you’ve built inside of yourself. you don’t solve her pain but you are the witness and the keeper, and she is coming home to you. “happy birthday, honey. i love you.”

you’re sort of sitting or crouching or cowering in this driveway now, looking up at the sky as though awaiting alien abduction. the world moves on around you regardless of this, regardless of if you had laid your flat face down to the concrete just then, even regardless of if you’d shocked the tenant as he backed up over you in his kia soul right before you took your last breath ever. that one’s kind of heavy, but it’s true. every day you are alive is a day you are not dead.

you hold hands with your early twenties, walking around Beachwood Canyon with an earbud in, listening to her big ideas about the future. you chop her shoulders like the masseuse as she cranes over a work desk, a guitar, a cat. you say, like the mother, this posture is no good for you. but it’s not the long term now, it is only then, and you are only looking through the glass. “happy birthday, honey. i love you.”

you’re here at twenty three today. in the stranger’s driveway you take a big gulp of air, like a seagull catching fish, and rise to the occasion. everyone you see on the way to the café is your friend — did you know that if you pass people and say “good morning” this is true?

you arrive to the counter puffy and laughing at yourself and just alongside the rest of humanity you sit out with your little cup and listen as the large hulking garbage truck goes by. it’s the greatest present in the world. happy birthday to me.

i hope the girl in this photo from the 50s also got the chance to metaphysically hold herself as a baby and think about the simultaneous beauty and horror of the passage of time