Yesterday was your birthday and I didn't forget, because godforsaken BIRTHDAY ALARM reminded me three times.
I can't remove you from Birthday Alarm because I don't know what Birthday Alarm is. Actually, I probably could remove you but when I get these e-mails blaring your name in the subject line and demanding that I remember your birthday I delete them as quickly as they come because it's weird to see your name in the subject line of any of my e-mails anymore. This is useful and still marginally necessary self-preservation but it also prevents me from acquiring any more information about Birthday Alarm, including the instructions of how to remove individuals from my virtual memory bank so that every year I'm not reminded of their birthday when I would just as soon not remember it.
Birthday Alarm also doesn't remind me about anyone else's birthday. I find this strange, given that I know a lot of people and care about a lot of birthdays. I can't imagine a time when I would have only asked to be reminded of yours, because I would have had no shot at forgetting it anyway.
I refuse to believe that you would have set your own Birthday Alarm for my benefit.
Without the electronic reminder, I would have remembered it anyway (but still thanks, really, for the alarmist bullshit that helped me remember it extra hard, Birthday Alarm, just in case I haven't been clear enough about that so far. Think you could tone it down just a notch? Seriously.) but I didn't consciously carry your claim to this day with me this year in my heart or my head for the first time in nine years. This was a relief. I just had to stop and think, actually do the math, to remember how old you were now because I was stuck between two options when I put a working title on this post.
I forgot that we're the same age every year for a month and 20 days.
Last year in the waning days of my denial about a variety of things both related to you and not, when we were still in some form of stupid electronic communication and I had in fact seen you on your turf just weeks before, I contacted a store in your city and had a gift card sent for your birthday, because I was incapable of ignoring it just then. I felt the familiarity in my veins, the necessity of marking your time in the context of my own. I knew you needed shoring up, I knew you weren't in a good place, and I couldn't be neutral.
I never could be neutral in your orbit. It just didn't work.
You contacted me to thank me for the present. We had a strange, long, online chat, and then December, 2008 happened, one of the most challenging months of my life, and I stopped talking to you. There were two e-mails in January, the last of which I ignored, and that was that. The contact stopped.
In the years of off and on I concurrently worried over and celebrated your birthday. I wanted to make it special, like people in my role in your life were supposed to do, and because really, at that time, I couldn't imagine a world into which you had not been born. There was the east, and you were the sun. I don't really remember, now, that any year was particularly fantastic, but I'm sure there were some that didn't suck. Nothing about our relationship - nothing, absolutely nothing, in hindsight - was logistically ideal. There was never enough private space or time to spend together, never enough time to relax, not really. This was both by necessity and design, as it turns out, and is a hallmark to me of that which is not meant to be.
If you can't relax into each other enough to roll with the punches and have a good time regardless of the situation you're done. I know that now. I could say I wish I'd learned it earlier but there was nothing about this that could have happened any differently. I know that now too. It still pisses me off but I know it.
The absence of (most) feeling is the most that I can ask for and as much as I can expect at this point, I guess. It's not so bad for a year. Our story ended unremarkably, actually. Unanswered e-mails and the inactive ceasing of communication between two intense communicators who communicated intensely together is probably the saddest possible outcome, in a way, but it's also appropriate. You finally reach a point where you've said enough, where you've done all that you could possibly do. It's like you walked down a long, long road together and for the last two blocks the conversation dwindled and at the final intersection one turned left, one turned right, and no one said anything.
I went left. I'm calling it.
When pressed I guess I could say that I miss you, but that would imply that I know you anymore and I don't. I have no idea where you are, besides the basic outline of a geographic area. I have no idea what you're doing, and that's good. That's so much better than good given the relative hell that I went through due to a focus on where you were and what you were doing for a very, very long time, something I say now with no blame but just an acknowledgement that that is how it happened. That is how much I cared. And what I can say is that having no contact, having no knowledge, is the best possible outcome for me and my somewhat fragile yet intensely resilient heart. I don't want to know. I don't need to know. I hope I never know again. It's just better and safer for me that way, and I finally care more about my mental and emotional health than I do about having any shred of information about you.
But what I do know is that all those years without me, when you had moved on in some fundamental ways but kept your hold on my heart, when I wished you a happy birthday, I'm pretty sure I didn't mean it in the way I was supposed to. I'm glad I don't have to do that anymore. I'm glad that now I can own the fact that I don't wish you any particular kind of happiness, any more than I wish you any kind of pain. I'm utterly neutral and more or less disinterested in the particulars. If I were a better person, i.e., the Dolly Parton or Whitney Houston in that godawful I Will Always Love You Song (dirty lie, ladies) I would have an interest that surpassed rhetoric in your happiness, but I don't. I am utterly neutral, and the best I can do is wish you neutral things, if I wish you anything at all. It's a relief to know what a tiny corner of the 7th represents, and to move on. That's where I ended up, and I'd think it was sad if only I wasn't so grateful not to be miserable anymore.











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