Happy Birthday

May 24, 2005
Dear R.,
It's my birthday today. Why do I think of you now? It is strange, how deeply I loved you, how hard I touched your face to memorize it, to now, a time when all I can remember is a scent of when we kissed. It has been two years since I last talked to you. I remember it well. We had a fight so heated, I yelled so loudly, blood vessels in my face and neck burst rendering me a victim to 24-hour smallpox.

May 24, 2006
It has been so long since I have written. Why have I moved away from writing as a means to find myself? The day is young. I am waiting around. I showered at the gym after getting my hair cut.

May 24, 2007
Microsoft Word just autofinished the date today: my birthday. Only once a year can I say such a thing. While true for all dates, today carries extra weight because attention turns in my direction.

Younger, my birthdays were events. Mom would give me special breakfasts...Now, on my birthday...I woke up at 7:45 to eat generic brand Apple Jacks, got dressed in my conformity company polo (stolen from a pile of leftovers at work), and roller bladed 7 minutes to the office.

Futures are uncertain. I wonder what I will be doing and how my life will be when I read this again in the future.

May 24, 2008
On to a new year. I’m ** now. One more year and I’ll be **. Scary. I wonder what my life will look like the next time I write in this file. Whether or not it is my birthday is irrelevant. Life changes so fast, something could be new tomorrow.

May 24, 2009
Today is my birthday, dear reader. Yes, yes, thank you for the birthday wishes. I didn't really have anything profound or amazing to write. I've been dreading this day, at least from a composition standpoint, for about a week.

Even with a week of preparation and soul searching, I've come up only with this: a post of excerpts from past journal entries that existed before this blog. Although it means very little to you, reader, I personally found it special and rewarding that I was able to dig up four years' worth of writing. Inelegant and trite, the writing from my past is like a stop-motion video of myself, aging in time.

I performed a type of personal research for these excerpts. I needed to boot up my old undergrad laptop. I needed to leaf through old notebooks. I needed to scour through dozens of Word files. But I found them—little time capsules dating back years from this exact day, my birthday.

And that seems to be a common theme among my birthday writings. I am either too rooted in the past or too puzzled by the future. Rarely do I seem present in the present. I should learn to live more in the now: to eat my birthday cake, to savor the spongy texture, and not to worry about getting fat or how many eggs were broken to make the cake.

But of all the days to be overly reflective, today provides the Siren-like temptation to live in the past and be eternally young.

I apologize for making you, reader, wade through old journal posts originally meant only for me, but consider this your present to me: allowing me to travel back in time and fondly reminisce about this day years ago. Allowing me to take past versions of myself and consolidate them into a temporal birthday celebration. I should be more in the present, but it's my birthday, and I'll be anachronistic if I want to.