The U.S. Mail is a Cruel Bitch (Birthday)
I will be 21 in a few hours when the clock strikes midnight on September 24th. However, it must be noted that I wasn’t born at midnight 21 years ago, I was born nearly a full 24 hours later than midnight, at 11:07 PM. I still celebrate the 24th as my birthday, though I spent only 53 minutes alive and separate from my mom way back when.
I think about this a lot on my birthday. I think about which act of serendipity made it so that I was born and not a child who looks like me, but isn’t me. I think about how difficult it must be to raise a baby into childhood, only to watch it leave home nearly two decades later. I think about how I really should give my parents more credit for raising a level-headed (most of the time) child like me in a town where spoiled children are practically a dime a dozen.
This will be my first birthday without my mom. I think about that all the time now. I mark my life a lot with milestones that she’s missed, but which we still celebrate in one way or another: her birthday, my parents anniversary. I think birthdays are different though. She’s the reason that I’m alive and tomorrow morning, I won’t wake up to her morning phone calls.
I am not nearly as excited to begin my life as a person who can consume alcohol in the manner in which she chooses as I am to hear from my mom again. I know, I told you she’s gone, and she is. But she left me things.
Her words still linger. I was promised back in January that on my birthday this year I would get a letter, that there were letters (I don’t know how many or when I will get them) floating around with my mother’s last words locked up in them. There are pearls of wisdom locked up in envelopes somewhere that isn’t here. I’m terrified that it won’t come, that none of them will come—that I waited for 9 months for nothing but disappointment.
So I just hold out hope that this letter is making it way slowly but surely to me through the mail. This isn’t a movie, 13 little blue envelopes won’t tell me to run off to England to find a man (I’m not that lucky) and I doubt they’ll end with ‘P.S. I love you.’, because that’s not something my mom would tack on to the end of a conversation. It’s something she’d start with. The most I’m hoping for is to hear her voice one more time. I don’t know if it will make me better, or rip me open again though.
All I want for my birthday is that letter. It’s what I’ll wish for—probably on every one of my birthdays, ever—tonight when I blow out the candle on my cake.
I turn 21 in 3 hours. Now I wait for that and my letter.
