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A Bittersweet read
I love holidays, I love themes, I love traditions, dressing up, buying gifts, and especially dessert.
But I think I only like birthdays.
I can’t deny the pressure on my heart when I watch someone blow out their candles. There’s
this achy feeling that builds inside me as soon as I see the flame go out. It doesn’t really matter
whose birthday it is; maybe it’s someone I know, a family member or a friend. It’s the same
feeling every time. I see that tiny trail of smoke and I’m suddenly reminded that another year has
gone by. In their life and in mine.
I think what makes birthdays so interesting to me is the idea that so many people gather
together to celebrate one year of someone’s life, even though most of them weren’t actually
there for the majority of it. Realistically, even the people closest to us haven’t seen every part of
our year. We all go through our own individual journeys. We have simple days, difficult
moments, new changes, and experiences that other people will never fully know about. Then,
once a year, we come together to celebrate those separate journeys as if we’ve all been there
this entire time.
Maybe that should make birthdays feel that much more special to me. Sometimes it does. Other
times, I wonder if we’ve started losing some of our original intent.
For instance, we’ve started combining birthday parties now. We’ve normalized convenience over
dedicated, thoughtful time. Pushing a celebration into two hours and just trying to get the
pleasantries out of the way as quickly as possible.
We talk so much about celebrating each other and giving people their flowers, but sometimes
we can’t actually give someone more than a few moments of our undivided attention. Maybe
that’s part of what bothers me about birthdays. A birthday is supposed to celebrate an entire
year of someone’s life, yet somehow we all try to fit a year full of appreciation into a couple of
hours.
It’s a tender, bittersweet feeling that’s difficult to put into words. I want birthdays to make me
smile, and on the surface they do, but underneath the celebration, I can’t help feeling the
reminder that time has passed. And the thought that we can’t really get that time back.
Suddenly, I’m not just thinking about the person blowing out the candles. I’m wondering if I’m
spending as much time with the people I love as I should. I’m wondering what more I could be
doing in my own world. I’m thinking about how quickly my own years are moving by. And maybe
hardest of all, I’m wondering how much time I have left with the certain people I love.
I’ve always been nostalgic. It’s a quality about myself that brings me to tears more often than it
brings me a happy thought. I have a tendency to miss things while they’re still happening, and
seem to only recognize that something will someday be a memory before it even has the
chance to become one.
Maybe that’s why birthdays affect me so much. They force me to count something I guess I’d
rather not count. They put a number on all of the time that has passed and ask me to celebrate
it. And I do celebrate it. I’ll dress up, I’ll buy a gift, I’ll blow up balloons, I’ll eat the dessert, and I’ll
sing “Happy Birthday” while smiling as someone makes their deserved wish.
But when the flame goes out, a small part of me will always hope I could put a few less candles
on the cake to begin with.