on birthdays, celebrations, and who we once were
Today’s title from a real indie sleeper/youtube musician from way back, “One Year Later” by singer-songwriter Danielle Ate the Sandwich (listen on bandcamp).
Today is my birthday.
I am loath to write this—as I’ve said before, I have historically kept my birthday secret, sometimes even from people who love me and already know when my birthday is, because I don’t like anyone making a fuss over me, and I would rather internally combust than draw attention to something like the day I was born by no achievement of my own—but I wanted to do something different this year. I’m working on integrating all my past selves, or, at the very least, appreciating them, which is sometimes hard to do because I feel they are so disparate, so different, so at odds with one another. But they aren’t: they’re all me.
I am also working on celebrating things, even if it doesn’t look like how everyone celebrates. I have resisted and continue resisting celebration, mostly because I’m always so damn scared that there’s nothing to celebrate, or that celebration will serve as a kind of jinx, you owe me a soda, you owe me that positive energy back, but in reverse now. It’s much easier not to celebrate, and I tell myself it’s safer. After all these years, I’m still afraid of looking foolish to other people, of feeling foolish within myself. I’m working on that, too.
I’m 32 today, which is one of those stupid birthdays that means nothing other than another year has passed. There are no 32 year milestones, no novelties, no gateways opened. I’ve heard friends say it’s merely one year closer to mid-thirties, which they always say with a kind of grimace—but I’ve never felt that way about age. So, to celebrate an otherwise meaningless number, I decided to take some time today to look at previous 2-year incarnations of Kirin.
at 2
Kirin lived in New Hampshire, where she saw the most snow she’d ever see (though it’s unclear whether the memory of snow walls is a real one or a fabricated one created after the fact out of stories of snow walls) and had a pool at her house which could only be used during the smallest window of summer (the pool, she wouldn’t remember at all). By all accounts, she was talkative, expressive, precocious as fuck. She was a sparklequeen, and dressed her enormous dogfriend Amadeus up for tea parties. In the photo below she’s roughly that age, on vacation in Montreal with her glittered tiger facepaint and her impeccable early 90s mullet. In the distant future, amidst her wedding celebration, her mother will tell a story that Kirin has never heard before about 2(ish) Kirin getting ready for a date with an invisible gentleman. She did her face, grabbed her purse, and “left” for the date—but came back very quickly. “He didn’t treat me right, so I left,” was the answer she gave her mother when asked how the date went.
thinking about bringing this look back into 2021 when I finally go anywhere ever again
at 12
Kirin was in Lynchburg, VA, the place she’ll always somehow, maybe even frustratingly, think of home, even after her parents move away and she has no reason to go back there. She was mouthy now, and mean to a lot of people who didn’t deserve it as only preteens can be. She was almost to the end of her first year of middle school, at a fancy new private school with a class of only 24 students, most of whom had gone to school together their whole lives. Kids had only just started being mean to her; she didn’t know how bad it would get. This might have been the last time in her life that she ever truly tried to fit in—she tried very hard here and reaped a harvest she never wanted again. She had a boyfriend for a couple weeks. They went to the Valentine’s Day dance “together,” Kirin with her boy hair in a thrifted vintage gown, a satin affair in deep magenta, makeup done very tenderly by her father. He broke up with her because she was “too weird and too overdramatic,” and he wasn’t wrong. Her most visceral memory from this time period is when she tried to play lacrosse with the boys one day, padded up and talking trash. Someone pushed her down, and the boys circled her and jeered insults. They didn’t do much else, but she’d never forget looking up, them silhouetted against the bright sky, their features indiscernible, that feeling of danger, being surrounded by boys who didn’t like you.
one of the few photos I could find from this time period, of me and my beloved razor scooter
at 22
Kirin was almost done with college. Her first ever play was being produced on the mainstage of her very fancy theater school, but she planned to have a successful career as a working actor in NYC, the city of her dreams. She had a ride or die crew, got lunch with her professors where they treated her like a colleague and told her how sure they were that she was going to be successful in whatever she put her mind to. She was wildly happy sometimes, ecstatic almost; one night alone, headphones in, music blaring, rain started to fall and she ran all the way from campus to her apartment, not because she didn’t want to get wet, but because the streetlights shined so beautifully, and because it felt good, and because she could, dizzy with contentment the whole way. Other times she was desperately sad, unsure of who she was but absolutely sure she was getting it wrong. Her whole life was ahead of her and she felt it, and, as usual, her expectations for the future were wildly off-base.
my hottest and best date ever, second only to M, who I thankfully locked down (love you, Bralow)
at 32
Today Kirin is exhausted from a late night full of deep discussion. They know they’ve made progress, and sometimes they see how far they’ve come, and sometimes they see how far they still have to go; sometimes, both. Their life looks nothing like any Kirins before would have predicted: they have an incredible spouse, a dog that is not a Newfie, the longest hair they’ve ever had, and a cleaning routine. They’ve had the hardest and also best few years in a row here, and that isn’t even counting the fucking bonkers pandemic they’re still living through. They are not an actor. They are not a playwright. Sometimes, they are a professor; many days, they just are. They have no discernible career or success, and they have a lot of love, and a lot of happiness, and a lot of contentment. They are working so hard on so many things, and learning how to make the work more fun, less serious, more useful. They still love sparkles; they have a pool, again, and this one they’ll be able to swim in most of the year. They still get nervous around middle schoolers, even after all these years, sure that those punks, too, will find some way to be overpoweringly cruel to them. They still have trouble expecting things to go perfectly or exactly according to some secret but meticulous plan, are still unsure of exactly who they are, are still worried about getting it wrong—but they are worrying far less, caring far less about being someone other than who they are right now, learning to put less pressure on things to go any way other than how they go.
They’re here. I’m here. That’s enough.
Happy birthday, Kirin.
put them 32 hands UP, muthafuckaaaaaaas
Thanks for reading. As always, yours, ready to receive.
KM