birthdays

a celebration, or lack therof

Apparently a lot of my friends have January and February birthdays. It feels like every weekend so far this year I’ve been invited to celebrate someone’s birthday. I try to make each of them but sometimes I couldn’t because of illness or exhaustion or being double-booked or just not getting an invite. It happens. Each one I’ve gone to has been a great time because I like my friends and I like celebrating with them and the people they know. It’s a good feeling.

Me personally I don’t have a party or an event or a dinner or a meetup at a bar or anything like that on my birthday. I can’t remember the last time I celebrated my birthday with people. Most of my friends don’t even know when it is, which has been a deliberate action on my part. I don’t want them to know. Crystal knows when my birthday is but that’s because she’s my astrologist and she needed it to read my chart. But other than that nobody really knows. I intend to keep it that way as long as I can.

I don’t like my birthday. It’s a date on the calendar I always dread, like tax day. To me that day represents another year wasted, another year getting older and closer to death. Another year of not doing what I want but also not knowing what I want. Another year lost in the fog and sputtering in life. It’s not very pleasant to me. 

I don’t really do anything out of the ordinary on that day, either. I don’t call out of work or take a day trip or treat myself to a dinner or a spa or something. I try to keep it normal. In 2021 I went to a rock show of a band I like and in 2022 I went to a party that a friend invited me to. I didn’t tell him it was also my birthday because I felt like it would be upstaging his event. So I kept it to myself. It was a solid evening. My family didn’t call because they assumed I would be out and about on the town and they were right.

On my last birthday I felt worse than I usually do. It was one of the worst birthdays I’ve had in a very long time. I woke up and walked to a nearby cemetery, which I wandered around in for hours. The cemetery was on a hill and had a good view of the Manhattan skyline. I remember sitting on a hill for a while, staring at the skyscrapers, listening to the album Bloom by Beach House and thinking about how I’m another year closer to 30 and still living in Bushwick, which filled me with a great sense of shame. After a while I got up and continued wandering amongst the graves and watched an ongoing funeral from a far distance.

As the cemetery closed for the day I walked home and grabbed a bottle of wine at a liquor store along the way. When I got home I made something unmemorable to eat and then drank the entire bottle of wine on my couch, alone. I remember listening to music but I can’t remember what exactly it was now but I’m sure it was something sad like Portishead or Radiohead.

I was drunk but wanted to drink more so I checked the fridge and found a couple of Labatt Blues that were hanging around. I chugged those but I still wasn’t happy. So to make myself feel better I threw the empty beer cans at the wall as hard as I could. I kept doing this, picking up the empty can off the floor and throwing it at the wall again and yelling loudly while doing so then grabbing the can and throwing it and so on and so forth. I could have done this for hours but I didn’t want to piss off my upstairs or downstairs neighbors so I only did it a couple of times. But I really wanted to do it all night. It felt really good, like I was releasing all the anger and sorrow that was trapped within in my body. After that I stumbled back onto the couch having drank all the alcohol in the apartment and cried until I passed out.

I don’t know what I’ll do for my birthday when it occurs again in a couple of months. I’ll turn 30 this year, which I’m both looking forward to and not at the same time. Maybe I’ll wander around a cemetery again. I don’t want to repeat drinking alone until I pass out again, though. I’ll have work in the morning and I don’t perform very well when I’m hungover.