Today is your 33rd birthday. We aren’t supposed to speak but I call you anyway to make sure you’re okay. I say, “Happy birthday,” and you say, “Thanks, I’m surprised you remembered.” I am in one of those long, dark passages that leads between BART and Muni stations, and there are Blackberry ads posted to all the walls that read, “Closeness has nothing to do with distance.” I say, “Of course I remembered, you know I’m good at things like that.” With those two words–”you know”–I accidentally betray the intimacy I feel for you. You know the small things, which are the things that matter most. You know how I scrunch my face when I cry and the way my shoulders heave when I write; you know that I embarrassingly can’t sleep without white noise, that I get drunk after only two beers. Someday someone else will know these things about me, but for now it’s only you.
Last week you went to Amsterdam without telling anyone, leaving the rest of us to quietly worry stateside. I imagine you wandering in and out of dimly lit coffeeshops astride the stone bridges and canals. I imagine that she went with you, her head dropping to your shoulder as she slept soundly on the flight. I imagine that you both got high in a park and fell asleep on a giant hotel bed with an art deco quilt. I know what it’s like to be in Europe with someone you love who doesn’t love you back, and now I imagine that you do, too. On the phone I ask if you are having a good birthday and you say, “Yeah, I really am,” and I imagine that she is sitting there beside you as I speak hesitantly into the phone, trying to mask the slice of my voice that shakes when I realize how much I miss you.
In February, on my own birthday, I threw a big party even though I hate big parties. You and I snuck out after an hour and I made almond pancakes and we fell asleep listening to This American Life. You hated how I would always wake you up in the middle of the program with my commentary on how the story unfolded. Once, during the episode about the girl who becomes pen pals with a South American dictator, I got so worked up that I had to go smoke cigarettes by myself in the living room. I hoped you would find some small part of my neuroses endearing the way I did yours: I loved when you wore the bent wireframe glasses you stole from your Dad, or how you always made the coffee far too strong. Learning how to love people’s flaws is the easiest way to shed misanthropy. I loved yours from the start, but this was not without consequence. It was all the things I forced myself to overlook that drove us to ruin; I was so willing to accomodate the worst of you that I ended up losing the best.
Today is your 33rd birthday and I still dream about you more than I’d like to admit. On Sundays my brain scampers off into some abstract galaxy and keeps me half-conscious throughout the night, thoughts of you lumbering in slow succession across my eyelids. There you are with your ankles buried in the sand, there you are with your scruffy cheeks hovering above my mouth. I think about drawing you a card and riding my bike to your house to leave it on your doorstep. I don’t–I won’t–and I’m sorry for that.
It’s your 33rd birthday. I see other people now, but in them I still see you: how they are like you, but mostly how they are not.
I love you! And I always have and I will never tell you that I don’t.
What a wonderful last line, Jess. Beautiful. Really hit me. Anyway, I miss you! Hope you’re enjoying SF.