44

Its Different this year..

The phone is face down because I’m tired of looking at it.

Not because I’m being mindful. Not because I’m protecting my peace, whatever that laminated phrase is supposed to mean. It’s face down because every time I check it, the silence gets renewed. Fresh coat. Same wall.

It’s the night before my birthday.

I’m alone.

There’s no clever way to place that on the page. I keep wanting to sharpen it, make it less naked, give it a coat and somewhere to stand. But the sentence won’t dress.

Tomorrow I turn forty-four.

The number feels rude. It doesn’t arrive with ceremony. It doesn’t care what I survived to get here. It just opens the door and walks in with its shoes on.

I used to think age happened gradually. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it drops through the ceiling at 11:47 at night while you’re sitting in a room too quiet to forgive you.

Tonight I can feel my body as temporary.

Not as philosophy. Not as one of those tidy little insights people collect after yoga and a bad divorce. I mean I can feel the fact of it. Chest. throat. ribs. pulse. skin. The machinery. The lease.

My chest feels empty and about to explode.

Both. Somehow both.

There’s a hollow under my ribs, but it isn’t light. It has weight. Pressure. It takes up space by being missing. I breathe around it carefully, like something inside me has cracked and been badly wrapped.

I don’t want to cry.

Not because I’m above it. I’m not above anything tonight. I’m down in it with the pipes and the mold and whatever else lives under the floorboards.

I don’t want to cry because I don’t trust the first tear. I don’t trust what’s stored behind it. There are years back there, badly packed. Grief folded into shame. Want folded into humiliation. Old rooms are still lit. Old versions of me waiting where I left them.

If I start, I’m afraid I won’t stop.

And the worst part is that some part of me wants the collapse.

Not death.

Not disappearance.

Collapse.

The end of holding my own shape by force. The end of being the man who can explain it, contain it, make it legible, make it almost useful.

I’m so tired of being useful.

Tired of turning pain into language quickly enough that it doesn’t make a mess on the carpet. Tired of being articulate about the thing that’s eating me. Tired of surviving with good sentence structure.

And then there’s him.

I hate that there’s a him.

I hate how ordinary that makes it sound. Like every other poor bastard who ever stood in front of an unavailable man and mistook a few moments of warmth for a door.

I’ve broken my own heart by falling in love with someone I can’t have.

There’s no elegant version. No architecture. Just the humiliating fact.

I know he’s unobtainable. I know the wall. I know the distance. I know the terms. I know the clever words for it. Projection. attachment. hunger. transference. old wound. unmet need. Pick one. Put it in a little hat. Parade it around the room. It changes nothing.

Knowing doesn’t stop the wanting.

That’s the obscenity.

I can see the trap and still feel my hand reaching. I can know he can’t love me the way I want and still search for evidence in the scraps. A pause. A softness. A message. A tone. The pathetic forensic science of longing.

There should be a lab for this. Men in coats examining a three-word reply under blue light.

Cause of death: hope.

I hate that I still hope.

I hate that my heart has no dignity. None. Not a chair, not a tie, not even a clean shirt. It shows up barefoot, starving, convinced this time the locked door might recognise it.

I also know why.

That’s what makes it worse. Ignorance would be a mercy. Confusion would give me somewhere to hide. But I know why distance feels familiar. I know why impossible love can pass itself off as fate. I know how old this hunger is.

I know.

And still I’m here.

The night before my birthday, alone, in a body that will end, loving a man who cannot be mine.

I feel hollowed out.

Not sad. Sad is too small. Sad has a beginning and a chair. This is larger and less civilised. I feel scraped. Reduced. Like life has been taking pieces for years and tonight I finally noticed the inventory.

I feel inconsequential to the world.

I can hear the counterargument already. People care. You matter. Reach out. Talk to someone. Drink water. Take a walk. All sensible. All true enough in the dull public way.

But tonight my body does not believe it.

Tonight I feel like a man whose absence has already been rehearsed and approved.

If I disappeared, would anyone come looking?

Not as drama. As logistics.

How long would it take?

Who would notice first?

Would my silence bother anyone before it became inconvenient?

I hate asking.

I hate needing the answer.

I hate being forty-four and still carrying the old fear that I am easy to leave, easy to forget, easy to not choose.

There are people who move through the world as if love is a country they were born in. They know the language. They understand the customs. They don’t flinch when kindness enters the room. They don’t look for the hook. They don’t stand at the border with their papers in their hand, trying to prove they have a right to be there.

I don’t know how to be one of those people.

I know how to read a room.

I know how to anticipate tectonics shifting by the look on a face.

I know how to make myself useful.

I know how to turn pain into sentences sharp enough to pass for control.

I know how to survive.

I don’t know how to believe I’m worthy of love when the night gets this quiet.

That’s tonight’s truth. Not the final truth. Not the whole truth. Tonight’s.

I feel like love happens elsewhere. To people with easier histories. People who don’t flinch at kindness. People who weren’t trained to read danger in the angle of a silence. People who can receive affection without checking the exits.

I feel too much and not enough in the same breath.

Too intense. Too guarded. Too articulate. Too watchful. Too hungry. Too tired.

Not easy enough.

Not light enough.

Not whole enough.

I am a shattered mirror.

I don’t mean that beautifully.

I mean, I don’t know how to hold one clean image of myself anymore. I catch fragments. Mouth. hands. eyes. damage. wit. longing. fear. The part that survives. The part that’s sick of survival. The part that still loves. The part that resents the lovers.

A shattered mirror still reflects, yes.

Fine.

It also cuts.

Let’s not get cute.

Tonight I don’t want anyone to tell me the pieces can be arranged into something meaningful. Maybe they can. Maybe later. Maybe some future version of me with better lighting and lower blood pressure can make a little shrine out of the wreckage.

Not tonight.

Tonight the pieces are on the floor.

Tonight I’m standing in them.

Midnight is coming.

Nothing will happen when it arrives. That’s the insult. No thunder. No hand at the door. No message that changes the shape of the night. No proof that I’ve crossed into another year and am still wanted by the living.

Just midnight.

Just the calendar doing paperwork.

I’ll turn forty-four whether I’m ready or not.

My body will keep going, until it doesn’t.

My heart will want what it wants, stupid and loyal and embarrassing as a dog waiting at the wrong house.

The phone will stay face down.

The room will remain a room.

And I’ll still be here.

I don’t know whether that’s hope.

I don’t want to call it that. Hope is too often a job people assign you when they’re uncomfortable with your despair.

This isn’t hope.

This is refusal, maybe.

Or inertia.

Or spite.

Or the small animal fact of breath continuing.

Maybe that’s all I have tonight.

Breath.

A room.

A birthday arriving like bad news.

A heart I can’t discipline.

A body that scares me because it will end.

A question I hate asking.

A love I can’t put down.

A self in pieces.

I’m not on the other side of this.

I’m not healed.

I’m not rising.

I’m not turning pain into power. Whoever came up with that phrase should be made to sit in a government waiting room until they descend into madness.

I’m just here.

The night before my birthday.

Alone.

Chest hollow. Chest burning.

Forty-four at the door.

Trying to get the thing out of my brain before it convinces me it’s the whole truth.

That’s the work tonight.

Not to be saved.

Not to be wise.

Just to stay with the sentence until it stops shaking.

I’m alone.

I’m hurting.

I’m still here.

“happy birthday”