Happy Fucking Birthday
When you're young, a birthday is exciting. You get new toys, get some cake, and maybe some ice cream, and you're surrounded by people who you *know* love you. However, we all have that core memory, you know the one. One year, you invite everyone in class to your birthday party, and nobody shows up. Maybe one or two kids show up, but you never really get to talk to them much afterwards, or if you're lucky, that turns into a budding friendship that lasts a very long time. Or maybe it didn't happen to you. Maybe you were one of the people who got an invite, someone that the mid thought was their absolute best friend, and you crumpled that into a ball on the way out of class for recess and saw him crying behind you as you did it. Maybe you felt guilty? Or maybe you felt absolutely nothing, and started playing with the toys you brought while other people played tag. Anyways, when it's 20+ years later, it doesn't matter. It's all muddy anyways, you're not sure what's a real memory and what's a fake memory anymore.
But after that day, did it not begin to feel different? Less and less people showed up every year, less and less family members. You realize that you don't even know these people and that your mom just invited distant cousins that you never see any other time of year, and as the years went by, less and less guests brought gifts, but instead brought more and more drama. Almost every time this group got together, someone was leaving early, and you were covering your ears. It began to feel less and less like *your day*, a celebration of what was to come, and more and more like a day you began to dread. Sometimes your mother would promise you a gift, and then you'd never get it. Sometimes she'd start a fight when you reminded her of what day it was, and then would eventually give you a gift after screaming at you for three whole hours. You began to realize that nobody actually loved you, and that a birthday was simply a chore for everyone wherein they were going through motions that they felt they were *supposed* to do, and not the motions that they*wanted* to do. There was no more cheer, there was only sadness and misery.
By the time you turn 18, there's only three people. Maybe you did get a good gift from one of them, but nobody else showed up, no more friends wanted to be around you because they claimed to have outgrown you. The most special thing is a call from your uncle in the Navy who killed himself the next year, which somehow sounds the most special despite him living on the other side of the country and your mother alienating you from that side of the family. It doesn't feel like a celebration of what you've become.
In your 20s, people come and go. The most special day has a friend come over late at night and drop by with a cake. The two of you hang out at your place for the first time since you finally moved out of your mom's house. You play video games, sing, and just vibe for the next few hours. You invite another friend you think they'd vibe with, but that friend only arrives two hours after the other friend leaves. You want to split the cake with him on Tuesday, since Monday is Memorial Day, but while you're at work, you get a call saying that someone broke into your house while the other friend was doing laundry there. The other friend managed to avoid them, even having no idea there was someone else in there. Your friend who got you the cake mocks you and insults you for being upset that someone broke into your house. Eventually he harasses you so hard over this that you have no other option but to quit your job. You realize that he never really cared about you, did he? Just another person going through the motions of pretending to care because they don't want to be alone. Happy Birthday, you get to move back in with your mom and lose your closest friend!
Now birthdays are just a gloomy day. You wake up alone in an empty apartment with pain all over your body, unsure if it's age or if you need a new mattress. You go outside through an empty hallway for a morning smoke, and the sky is gloomy. Maybe it'll rain, maybe it won't. Your lungs burn as the tar settles in them. That wasn't much of a thing last time you were smoking, but you were also younger and didn't smoke as much. You try reaching out to people, but nobody who likes you lives in the same city as you. All your friends who cared moved on and found a better city to live in as you stay in this rotting and decaying carcass they call a town. You go inside, lungs burning, and you chug two full cups of water. You realize that you haven't eaten in awhile, but you don't really care, your stomach feels full anyways from all that water. You plop down on the couch and just try to fall asleep again, but despite feeling exhausted, no sleep comes. You just sit there doing absolutely nothing until your phone goes off from your sister who's halfway across the state saying "Happy Birthday" with a picture of a gravestone saying "your twenties". You decide to scroll YouTube for a bit, but nothing good is in your recommend. You sit there for an hour scrolling forgettable garbage slop, and then you realize you're hungry for slop. So you grab some spinach, onions, black olives, and mushrooms, blend them together, for fry them in a pan with eggs and yams, and eat it while watching more slop. It tastes good.
Today, on this day of turning thirty, a birthday feels like a reminder that I'm one step closer to being six feet under, a reminder that those little grey hairs are going to one day cover my entire head, or that I'll see them fade away and I'll go bald. That the wrinkles under my eyes and on my cheeks and forehead will get bigger, the skin will get paler, and my eyesight will get worse and worse until I can't see anything. That one day, probably closer to today than the day I was born with the luck I've seen and the battles my body fights against the cigarettes I breathe and the garbage I put into my body, I will stop struggling to simply exist, and I will die. Slowly from there, everyone I've ever met will eventually forget about me, and nobody will ever mention my name ever again. I will fade away into the ether without anyone having known my name, and without achieving anything that would have affected the world in any way possible.
I call this meal *Shrek* by the way.