An Unhappy Birthday

They're singing happy birthday.

The whole bar spontaneously broke out into it and it's all kind of overwhelming, a cacophony of voices falling all over each other in exactly the way you'd imagine they would when it's an hour before last call and someone decides to strike up the band and twist the arm of every last person in the place to sing along to the song we all know: Happy Birthday.

Fuck, it's probably not even singing at this point. Singing involves melody and rhythm. This is caterwauling and it is close to unbearable.

Still it is everything that I want out of life except for the one thing that makes it all wrong.

I have the strength to admit to it, to own up to it willingly and without pressure. You don't have to push me or twist my arm. Here, I'll go ahead and say it myself.

I am a complete and utter weirdo.

But now that I've owned up to it I'll have to set some conditions, kind of walk things back a little bit and make it make sense. Because I am a weirdo but I do set limits on that. Not every part of me is weird and I think that makes a bit of sense. No one is defined entirely by one single aspect of themselves. People are complicated little bundles of contradictions and in that I am no different than any other person out there.

But in this respect I am a complete and utter weirdo. A brief sample poll of people would show me to be so far in the minority that I might just stand alone in the whole world as the one singular person who likes it when people sing Happy Birthday to him at a restaurant.

So when the bar spontaneously breaks out in Happy Birthday right here and now it hits a special little part of me, myself, and I just right.

I mean granted it's a little bit odd for it to happen in a bar this late in the night. When you think of people singing Happy Birthday out in public you usually conjure images of some sort of crappy chain restaurant with goofy shit on the walls and staff all wearing the same uniform at every single franchise across the country or globe. This isn't that kind of place though and it isn't that kind of night and the people singing aren't just staff it's every last person in the bar all practically screaming out the strains of this only too familiar song at a piercing wail so high it's almost more of a shriek than a melody and god it should make the most unrestrained person cringe but it only makes me smile.

Or it would.

Today is my birthday. My thirty-fourth year on this rock as it travels around the sun. Today is my birthday and I am in this bar surrounded by people screaming out this song and I'm mumbling along with it and doing my level best not to look across the bar at the person wearing the crown, but in spite of my best efforts I haven't been able to miss her.

She is cute and petite and pretty. Probably around my age but with a jaunty tiara on her head and a twinkle in her eye. She's got friends all around her and a sash that denotes her as the birthday girl because it's her birthday and it's her special day and all of her friends are making sure that it's something to remember.

It's her birthday.

It's my birthday too but no one would know it.

No. That's not true. That's a little too deep into pity to be wholly accurate. 'No one in the whole world knows that it's my birthday' is a statement made by a man deep in his cups who is hoping for the worst case scenario. Something so cartoonishly bad that it's nothing but a nightmare that he'll one day wake up from and when he does he will be able to put it all behind him and open his eyes into a better life than the one he lives in now.

Truth is my life isn't some nightmare and it isn't some kind of dramatic horror show. It's simple and it's ordinary and absent of drama. It's a life like any other life out there.

And maybe that makes it oh so much more tragic after all.

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