Birthdays

You grow up with an expectation of acquiring everything you had ever dreamed of when you were a child. You had painted a silhouette of yourself on a canvas with a graph running across your life. The graph had a timescale and the events in your life fit in perfectly across that graph. You greet the untrodden space on that graph with a countenance so pleasing that even you begin to feel deranged in your own life. You wonder what the meaning of evolvement is and why you added so much emphasis on it as a bouyant teenager. You miss the feeling you had as a 6 year old girl marking time for her new dress that her mother so carefully tailored for her every birthday and the cake that boundlessly engineered to have a theme and matched with your hair clip. On a spur of a moment you feel your life was superior when you could enjoy the feeling of the applause as you successfully blew out the candles and were able to conjure up a list of all the friends who would be invited to your special day. What does this day mean to you now, you speculate. Just another year of your life that has passed you leaving you overwrought with more responsibilities and the accountability of the past and the preoccupation of the future. Some would frown upon your age and call you a fossil and others would do the same but squaring off behind your back. How hollow are those birthday wishes now when you yourself cannot feel the happiness it is supposed to bring in your heart as you wish yourself on the big day. Gone are those days when you counted every single day till your birthday appeared and wondered if there would be a load shedding and you would be permitted to play on the street with your friends. Gone are those days when you would proudly declare it’s your birthday to every person you met that month. Perhaps when your unborn child enters this world, birthdays would have a new excitement and connotation to it. You could re-live your childhood and teenage years through your offspring. But until then, I can know you as long as I don’t put you through a wringer giving you the third degree about your kosher identity. You are not open enough to the world and its intricacies. You wish to remain enclosed in your own space and sometimes you wish you could be invisible and walk through walls without bruising yourself. Sometimes your mind wanders in an alternate reality where you are never beseeched upon. Why is it so important for the world to know you when they can just as easily be a part of your life without catechizing your mind. Your spirit is free but not your mind. Your heart has unlimited space but your soul fears intimacy. You live in a world where you feel people judge you based on your retaliation. The arbitration baffles you more than causing you pain and yet you do not seek an environment where you are subjected to interrogation regarding your feelings or your personal space. Your unborn daughter gives you a hope that is beyond anything that anyone could ever give you. You feel blessed for her presence and hope it is an everlasting one. Quest for truth is all you desire and yet you may someday open up to this world that is devoid of real emotion and certainty. You are not alone, I can assure you that much. I don’t know if that would suffice your human condition but may be it will help you fight the demons inside your head that today take over your innocence while you sleep in the dark.