Thirty-nine years. No longer out for blood – my own, always. No shards hiding in my bag for relief. No beer bottles pretending to be medicine. No more I will love you only if… or You wanna cry? Do it in your room! I don’t want your tears! on repeat. No longer alone in a blackout, scooping flood water out of our house or counting saline drops in my mother’s IV bottle, because she deemed herself a more important god than doctors’ hands. No more peering into windows, seeking a home with sunlight, yet on my plate, never-ending storms.
No, this is twenty-some years after, when birthdays were a catastrophe. Today I trade heels for hiking shoes; eardrum-shattering parties for birdsong. The six-hour bus ride brings me and my ten-year old to a small inn nestled in the Cordillera mountains. My mother does not know where we are. Fifth year. One can forgive but still say enough.
Upon arrival, I left my kid with her cousin to buy a birthday dinner: tempura, pad thai, a fist-size cake. Rain and strong winds at war with my weak umbrella. Cabs come, cabs leave. Every arrival taken, every hope refused for an hour. Everything familiar: tired muscles, soaked pants, the dark spaces in a taxi where a sappy 80s song plays.
My phone rings. Cough. Mama, there’s blood in my phlegm. Cough. My heart pounded. “Baby, maybe your throat’s just inflamed. Wouldn’t worry too much.” The ex-nurse in me has gotten better at lying through repeat sickness.
“Almost there. Got your meds and shrimp.”
Breathless from sprinting, I apologized for the late dinner. On the bed, we eat in takeout boxes like bears: greasy hands, stray rice on the sheets, laughing in between coughs, a Miyazaki film streaming. My daughter falls asleep midway. I tauten a blanket with pink daisies to her chin. Today’s mishaps are book pages flipping in the mind’s eye. I smiled. How enlightening in its ordinariness a birthday is. My arms wear scars as journal entries no more. My belly knows sober euphoria. I now see storms as a prelude to komorebi, of returning to nurture a sick child in a way that I wasn’t.
My arms bask in the warmth of her skin as the rain pitter-patters in the twilight. We weather catastrophes on every occasion. Birthdays are attached to meanings – a warm home, above all. On my thirty-ninth I understand: This is what it feels like.
This first appeared in Issue 2 of Epistemic Literary. You can also hear me reading the piece on audio on their website.
It was also nominated by the editors for Sundress Publications’ 2025 Best of the Net.
