The Day So Far

I woke up this morning with no expectation of anything happening for my birthday, let me be clear about that. I didn't want any celebrations and didn't think I'd get any. Not a cake and definitely no streamers and no one singing Happy Birthday to me. None of that.

I'd have to have remembered my own birthday in order to expect that others would celebrate it in some way, and the truth is that today I didn't wake up remembering what day it was. I forgot, and so did everyone else.

Instead I rolled out of bed with that sort of vague half-wakefulness and I blearly stepped over to the bathroom to go through my morning divestments and preparations. Stepping into the shower to wash the sweat and the stiffness of the night off myself and mechanically brushing my teeth before swearing as I remembered that I had coffee and breakfast to make my way through first. I put on a variation of the same outfit that I wore every weekday and I stepped out of the house into the cool half-chill of the early fall air and stepped up the front steps of my basement apartment.

I went to work, an office job that was little more than passing files from one place to another with my only impact on them bearing the form of some slight adjustment that would be missed by all but the most careful and attentive of eyes and I did my best not to notice how well that worked as a metaphor for my life and my impact on the world around me. I checked my email in the morning and I mechanically separated and sorted all of them. I was, in fact, quite successful in my most important daily task: ignoring that even here in the office the only emails I got from anyone were group ones. Nothing direct. Nothing just for me. Not one with my name on it.

I noticed the absence first.

It didn't register with me, except as an absence. It was the empty little space, that little nagging note that stuck in the back of my brain like a splinter, calling my attention without giving me any answers. I found myself going over my day moment by moment, playing it all back again and double checking every last thing to figure out what it was that was missing until it all clicked all at once and I realized, glancing at my email and seeing the date emblazoned on each one of them, what it was that I'd forgotten.

Every office job that I've ever worked takes note of the birthdays and makes a small show of them. An email gets sent out. A card gets filled with meaningless half-sentiments of goodwill that befit the kind of half-life relationship you have with your coworkers. Maybe, if you've been there more than a few years, someone buys cupcakes for the office.

I got nothing.

Can I blame them? Not really. I doubt half the people who sit in the desks around me can even conjure my name without effort. And the fact that I forgot my own birthday should make it easier to take, because I clearly wasn't and never did make any effort to celebrate it.

So rationally it shouldn't have affected me. I should have been able to shrug and go on with my day or even better yet not shrug at all. I should have been able to accept it, and maybe the fact that I couldn't was actually the most frustrating part of all, because it meant that I wanted to be the kind of person who didn’t care but couldn’t quite get myself to that point. It meant that even the lie I could live with, was a lie I could not swallow.

Regardless it happened. I'd drifted so far into the background that even the person who sends out the impersonal birthday emails and does the overwhelmingly boring task of pulling a greeting card from the back of the storage closet in the office and organizing signatures on it had forgotten about me. I had no recognition whatsoever, and the part that I hated most about that was that I hated that it stung as much as it did.

I hope you are far more fortunate than I and I hope that you have never had this happen. But if you have never had your birthday forgotten, well I imagine that there is a part of you that's curious what it's like. Maybe it's a morbid part of you and maybe it's a part of you that you're not too fond of, but it's probably there in the background regardless so I'll go ahead and satisfy your curiosity.

Here is how it goes when everyone, including you, forgets about your birthday.

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