My Birthday, May 8, 2026

Another birthday.
The body keeps score,
but the mind keeps receipts.

I woke this morning with the familiar inventory:
a knee that predicts rain better than meteorologists,
reading glasses that vanish while sitting on my head,
the alarming realization
that people born in 2004
are now old enough to explain technology to me slowly.

I have become the person
who says things like,
“Music was better when musicians suffered properly,”
while eating cereal for dinner
because adulthood is mostly exhaustion
decorated with throw pillows.

And still—
there is coffee.
There is sunlight crawling across the kitchen floor
like it has nowhere more important to be.
There is the miracle of someone texting,
“Thinking of you today.”
Three words.
Tiny candles against the dark.

I used to believe joy arrived
like fireworks—
loud,
cinematic,
deserved.

Now I think joy is sneakier than that.

It hides in ordinary places:
the cashier who calls you honey,
the dog asleep in impossible trust,
the friend who remembers your old stories
and asks for them again anyway.

The world, meanwhile,
is auditioning daily for its own collapse.
Wars bloom on screens beside weather reports.
Children practice lockdown drills
before multiplication tables.
Truth has become a competitive sport.
Outrage has a rewards program.

Some mornings it feels irresponsible to laugh.

But maybe laughter is not surrender.
Maybe it is resistance.

Maybe joy is not naïve.
Maybe joy is the stubborn refusal
to let cruelty have the final line.

I think about how many birthdays
I wasted waiting
to become a better version of myself—
thinner,
calmer,
more organized,
less human.

What a strange thing:
to postpone gratitude
until you become imaginary.

So today,
I will celebrate the flawed architecture.

This face,
still carrying every year like a handwritten note.
This heart,
patched together more times than anyone knows.
This life,
which did not become perfect
but did become interesting.

And perhaps that is enough.

Perhaps surviving long enough
to learn tenderness
is its own astonishing achievement.

Tonight I will blow out candles
while pretending not to count them,
surrounded by people equally confused by existence,
and together we will eat cake
as if sugar itself were hope.

Which, honestly,
it sometimes is.