Happy Birthday to Me
I read the text twice, like the words might rearrange themselves into something kinder.
Stay home—it’ll be easier.
Same birthday. Same face. Same mother. And somehow, I was still the extra.
Two weeks earlier, my grandmother collapsed in the kitchen of her house, and I was the one who drove to the hospital at eleven at night, parked in the emergency lot, and sat by her bedside through the small hours of the morning. The room hummed with machines and quiet worry, that particular ICU frequency that makes you feel suspended between the ordinary world and some other, more serious one. I held her hand and watched her breathe and thought about all the evenings I’d spent at her kitchen table, the two of us eating soup and talking about nothing, and how at some point that kitchen-table version of her had stopped being something I could take for granted.
When my mom finally swept in the next morning—perfect hair, designer bag, the kind of polished composure that makes other people instinctively step aside—her first question wasn’t How is she?
It was: “Did she say anything about her will?”
I didn’t answer. I just looked at her, and something that had been slow to form finished forming. I watched her eyes move around the room, calculating. I watched her settle into a chair like she was at a board meeting. And that’s when I understood, with a clarity that felt almost physical, exactly what kind of week this was going to be.
The family meeting happened the next morning in the hospital family room—a beige box with motivational posters and a coffeemaker that had been empty for hours.
My mom sat like a judge. My dad stayed silent in the corner, the way he did when he’d already decided that whatever was coming was easier to endure than to prevent. My twin Harper sat across from me with her hands folded in her lap and a small, careful smile on her face that told me she already knew the outcome.
“I can be her medical proxy,” I said. “I’m the one who visits every week. I know her doctors, I know her medications, I know what she’d want.” I said it simply, not as an argument but as a fact, the way you state facts when you believe they’re self-evident.
My mom didn’t blink. “That won’t be necessary. Harper will do it. She’s more stable.”
She said the word stable the way people say mature or responsible when what they actually mean is easier to manage. Harper was stable the way a surface can be stable—smooth, navigable, unlikely to cause anyone difficulty. I was unstable the way honesty is sometimes unstable. These were not the same thing.
“Harper’s birthday party is next Saturday,” my mom added, as if the conversation about medical proxies had already been concluded and filed. “Family only.”
I stared at her. “What about my birthday?”
She waved a hand—the gesture she used to dismiss things she found slightly inconvenient, not quite worth a full dismissal but certainly not worth engaging. “You don’t even like parties. It’s easier this way.”
I looked at Harper. She was studying the motivational poster on the wall. Tough times never last, but tough people do. I wondered if she’d read it or if she was just glad for somewhere to put her eyes.
I said nothing. I drove home. I sat in my apartment and thought about how long a person can tell themselves that something is fine when it isn’t, and how fine becomes normal becomes just the way things are, and at what point you stop waiting for the story to change.
Friday night, a pink box arrived on my doorstep. Tied with a silver ribbon. A card in Harper’s handwriting on top, the loops familiar and round, the way her letters had looked since fourth grade when she’d practiced cursive on a whole spiral notebook just because she wanted to be good at something small and pretty.
Inside: cupcakes from the one bakery I trusted. She knew that about me—had known it for years, since the incident at a birthday in college where I’d gotten sick from someone else’s kitchen and ended up in urgent care while the party carried on around my empty chair. After that, Harper was the one who’d found this particular bakery with its laminated allergy statement posted behind the glass case, its staff who answered questions without impatience, its commitment to separate prep areas.
She knew me well enough to buy from there. She knew me well enough to know I’d hesitate at any other source.
I set the box on my kitchen counter and stood there looking at it for a while. The card said Thinking of you on our birthday in her round cursive. Something about it felt like an olive branch. Something about it felt like a door cracked open. I was aware—very aware—of how much I wanted to believe it was real, and how wanting it to be real meant I was still hoping the story could change.
I went to bed with the box still on the counter, unopened.
Our birthday morning arrived the way it always had: March, cold, the particular flat grey light that comes off the sky in early spring before anything has started to bloom. I’ve always liked birthdays in theory. In practice they tend to be specific measurements of where you are versus where you expected to be, and lately mine had been measuring a distance I didn’t know how to close.
My phone stayed silent all morning.
No call. No text. Not even the brief, perfunctory Happy birthday I might have expected—the kind that means nothing but at least means someone remembered. I made coffee and checked my phone four times before I stopped. On the fifth time I opened my social feed instead, and immediately wished I hadn’t.
My family was toasting Harper under a tent of fairy lights. A three-tier cake with white frosting and gold lettering: Happy 25th, Harper. My parents on either side of her, my aunts, my cousins, my dad’s mother—the full constellation of family that had always surrounded the two of us on this day, arranged now around only one of us as if the other had never been.
The caption read: Surrounded by everyone I love.
I wasn’t tagged. I wasn’t mentioned. In the comments, my aunt wrote She gets more beautiful every year! and my dad wrote a heart emoji and someone I didn’t know wrote Lucky girl!
I set my phone face-down on the table.
I sat there for a while, not doing anything. Not crying—that came later. Just sitting in the kind of quiet that has weight to it, that presses on your chest from the inside.
Then I went to the counter and opened the pink box.
I want to be honest about this part. I knew something was wrong before I could name it. The cupcakes looked exactly right—the swirl of frosting, the delicate crumb, the shop’s signature presentation. But there was something in the smell that wasn’t quite familiar, something underneath the vanilla that made the hairs on the back of my neck raise without knowing why. The body, it turns out, is very good at knowing. The mind is the slower one.
I told myself it was just anxiety. I told myself I was looking for reasons to be right about feeling wrong. I told myself: this is the bakery she always buys from, the one she knows is safe, she knows your allergy, she’s known it since childhood, she’s your twin.
I took one bite.
The reaction was fast. Not cinematic—not the dramatic collapse of movies—but a fast, certain tightening in my throat, a heat along my skin, my tongue beginning to swell in the particular way it does when my body encounters something it recognizes as a threat. The taste of almonds, bitter and unmistakable, settling onto the back of my tongue.
I grabbed my phone. My hands were already shaking.
I got through the emergency call before my voice broke—just barely. And what stopped me cold, in that moment when everything was tilting and I was trying to hold onto the floor with my attention because the rest of me was falling away—wasn’t the fear, wasn’t the physical crisis.
It was what I heard next.
The dispatcher’s voice was polite but oddly distant, like she was reading from a page she’d consulted before. “We do have a note here,” she said carefully. “A family member mentioned you might be prone to anxiety episodes. Are you safe right now?”
The room tilted further.
Someone had called ahead. Someone had built a version of me—dramatic, unreliable, prone to episodes that shouldn’t be taken too seriously—and sent it ahead of my voice like an advance party. Harper hadn’t just sent cupcakes. She had staged a version of me designed to arrive before I ever could, to seed doubt in the people who might otherwise simply believe me.
For one terrible moment, even I doubted myself. That’s what this kind of thing does. It slips under your skin, borrows your own voice, uses your history against you—all the times you’d been told you overreacted, all the times you’d been called difficult—and for one second, even you wonder if you’re the thing they’ve described.
Then the taste of almond brought me back.
“I’m not having an anxiety episode,” I said, and the calm in my voice surprised me. “I’m having a severe allergic reaction. I am allergic to tree nuts. I need help right now.”
Allergic. That changed everything. The professional distance in her voice snapped into focus. I heard chairs scraping in the background.
“Stay on the line. Help is on the way.”
The next ten minutes stretched like wire.
I sat down on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets—the floor felt solid, the cabinets felt solid, I needed something solid—and breathed in slow counts the way I’d been taught years ago at an allergist’s office. Stare at something steady. Keep the breath moving. Don’t let panic double the problem.
On the counter above me, the single candle I’d planned to light for my birthday stood waiting, still in its paper wrapper. Untouched. There was something about that candle—the small defiant hopefulness of having bought it for myself, of having planned the small ritual of birthday-for-one—that made my throat close for reasons that had nothing to do with almonds.
I thought about Harper’s neat handwriting on the card. Thinking of you on our birthday. I thought about the bakery she knew I trusted, the shortcut it provided. I thought about the call she’d placed before mine, the story she’d already told, the version of me she’d delivered to the dispatcher like a signed affidavit.
She had done this deliberately. I didn’t want it to be true. I turned it over and looked at it from every angle I could find, the way you do when you’re trying to find the reading where the thing isn’t as bad as it looks. But there was no other reading. She had known my allergy. She had known that bakery. She had known that I would trust it precisely because she’d recommended it, because our history with food and care was built on that trust.
And she had called ahead to undermine anything I might say.
By the time the paramedics arrived, my hands were trembling so hard I could barely undo the latch on the door. What came next came in fragments: oxygen, a quick assessment, the cold vinyl of a stretcher, the strange fluorescent overbrightness of an emergency bay. A doctor who moved efficiently and spoke in a register that told me he took me seriously.
“Severe nut exposure,” he confirmed. “You’re lucky you called when you did.”
Lucky.
I lay staring at the ceiling, the word turning over in my head. Lucky that I’d eaten a cupcake sent by my own twin and survived. Lucky that the story Harper had written about me hadn’t held long enough to convince the dispatcher to dismiss me. Lucky that my body had reacted fast enough, clearly enough, undeniably enough, to override whatever narrative had been laid down in advance.
I thought about the word lucky and what it meant that I had to be lucky on my own birthday, in my own kitchen, eating something from a person who had known me my whole life.
My phone buzzed sometime in the afternoon. A message from my mom.
Heard you had a little episode. This is exactly why we didn’t want any drama today. Please don’t make Harper’s birthday about you.
I read it once. Then again. Each time, it hollowed me out a little more, until what was left at the center was clean and sharp and absolutely certain.
This wasn’t an accident.
Harper knew my allergy. Everyone did. It was the reason our kitchen growing up had two sets of baking pans, two labeled jars of everything, two shelves in the pantry color-coded by my mom herself when I was diagnosed at nine years old. We had blown out candles together every birthday since childhood with the same careful rituals, the same checked ingredients, the same specific caution that became second nature to everyone in our family the way allergies do when they’re taken seriously.
You don’t forget something like that about your twin. You don’t forget twenty-five years of two jars of everything. You choose to ignore it. You make a choice.
I lay in the hospital bed and looked at the ceiling and let the certainty settle. Not as grief—that would come later, in its own time. As information. Clear and final as a test result.
Then I called the one person in the family who still felt solid.
My grandmother’s voice was thin but steady. She said “Happy birthday, sweetheart” before I could speak, and the tears came fast and hot at the sound of it—the first ones all day, the real ones, the ones that had been waiting since I’d opened my social feed that morning and found myself erased from a caption.
I told her everything. Not in a rush, not like a confession, but slowly, the way you tell a record that needs to be complete. The cupcakes. The taste of almonds. The dispatcher and the note that had been placed there in advance. The text from my mom about drama. I told it in order, without embellishment, because there was no need for embellishment. It was already exactly as bad as it was.
My grandmother listened without interrupting. Her breathing was the only sound on the line—thin, a little effortful, but steady. The same steadiness I had counted on my whole life without fully knowing it.
When I finished, there was a long silence.
“I wondered how bad it had gotten,” she said finally. “I’ve been watching it get worse for years, and I kept hoping I was wrong. I didn’t want to believe it.”
“I didn’t either,” I said.
“I know, sweetheart. I know.”
We didn’t say much after that. She asked if I was safe, if I was being cared for, if I had someone to drive me home. She said she loved me. She said she was sorry I’d had to spend the day this way. She said: Come see me tomorrow morning. Can you do that?
I said yes.
When I arrived the next morning, my parents and Harper were already there.
They had arranged themselves around my grandmother’s hospital bed with the composed concern of people who had prepared for this meeting. My dad in the chair by the window. My mom standing, slightly apart, with her purse on her arm—ready to leave if leaving became necessary, always a slight readiness to leave. Harper in the chair nearest the bed, her posture soft, solicitous.
I stood in the doorway for a moment before anyone noticed me.
Then my mom turned and began talking immediately, the way she did when she wanted to control the shape of a conversation from the first word.
“We were just discussing how to handle your episode yesterday,” she said. “You really scared everyone. If you’d just asked for help instead of making a scene—”
“I did ask for help,” I said. “That’s why I called 911.”
“You know what I mean.” Her smile held its professional pleasantness. “Situations like this have a way of spiraling when—”
“It wasn’t an episode,” I said. “It was an allergic reaction. To cupcakes Harper sent. Cupcakes with nuts.”
The room changed.
Not loudly—there was no outburst, no accusation, no dramatic confrontation. The change was subtler than that. My dad shifted in his chair. My mom’s smile held its shape but lost its substance—the expression stayed but something behind it went very still. Harper, for the first time, looked directly at the blanket on my grandmother’s bed.
“That’s a serious accusation,” my mom said.
“It’s a fact,” my grandmother said.
Her voice was soft, but it carried the kind of authority that comes from a lifetime of watching other people mistake their volume for importance. She reached to the bedside table and lifted a small white box. The bakery’s logo. I recognized it immediately, and my stomach turned.
“I asked a nurse to have the remaining cupcakes tested,” she said. “After I heard what happened. They contain almond flour.”
The silence that followed was absolute. No one rushed to fill it. Harper’s face had gone the particular colorless shade of someone who had been counting on something not to happen and was now watching it happen.
“I—I didn’t know,” she said, her voice faint. “They must have changed the recipe.”
“They didn’t,” I said. “You’ve been buying from them for years.”
“Harper.” My grandmother said her name quietly. Just her name. Nothing else needed to be attached to it.
Harper’s hands tightened in her lap. She opened her mouth, then closed it. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t require admitting something she wasn’t ready to admit, or lying in a way that the evidence in my grandmother’s hands would immediately contradict.
For the first time in our lives, the story Harper had told about me—dramatic, unreliable, prone to making scenes—had nowhere to land. There was only the lab result, sitting plain and undeniable in my grandmother’s hands. Almond flour. In a bakery my twin had personally vouched for as safe. Delivered to my door on our birthday.
My mom looked at the box for a long moment. Then she looked at Harper.
I watched something pass between them—a communication too fast and too small for anyone else to read, the compressed language of people who have been in alignment for a long time and are suddenly, uncomfortably not. My mom’s expression shifted. Not to remorse, exactly. To recalculation.
“I’ve made a decision,” my grandmother said.
All eyes moved to her.
“I will be assigning an independent medical proxy. A professional, not a family member.” She looked at my mom with calm directness. “And I will be revising my will with my attorney present, beginning this week.”
My mom opened her mouth.
“I’m not finished,” my grandmother said.
My mom closed her mouth.
“This family has spent a long time confusing convenience with love. Confusing compliance with character. Deciding that the child who caused no friction was worth more than the one who caused some, without ever asking whether the friction was reasonable.” She paused. “I won’t reward that. I won’t make decisions about my estate or my care based on who was easiest to be around.”
She looked at me then. Just for a moment. A small nod.
“That’s all I wanted to say,” she said.
No one argued. There was nothing left to argue with. My mom picked up her purse—the slight, practiced readiness to leave had become actual leaving—and said something about needing to get home, needing to make calls. My dad followed. Harper stood slowly, not meeting my eyes, and followed them to the door.
At the threshold, she stopped.
She didn’t turn around. She just stood there for a moment, her hand on the doorframe, and I watched her shoulders rise and fall with a breath that seemed to take something out of her.
Then she left.
I sat with my grandmother for a while after they’d gone. She was tired—the kind of tired that settles into bones and doesn’t lift easily—but she seemed lighter in some way, as if the conversation had relieved her of something she’d been carrying for longer than I knew.
“Did you know?” I asked. “Before yesterday?”
“I suspected something was wrong,” she said. “I’d been watching the way they spoke about you for years. The way Harper would say your name with that particular care, like she was choosing the right distance.” She was quiet for a moment. “I didn’t know how bad it had gotten. I’m sorry I didn’t look harder.”
“You’re sick,” I said. “You’ve had enough to deal with.”
“That’s not an excuse,” she said. “Love is a verb. You have to do it on purpose, even when it’s inconvenient.”
I thought about that. I thought about my mom’s hand-wave in the family meeting, light and final: It’s easier this way. I thought about my name absent from a birthday caption, about a birthday party arranged around my twin as if our shared day had always belonged only to her.
I thought about how long I had arranged myself to be easy. How much of my life I had organized around not causing friction, not making scenes, not needing things that would be inconvenient to provide. And how little it had mattered. Ease, I was understanding, was not the same as safety. Being easy to be around was not the same as being loved.
“You should go home and rest,” my grandmother said. “Actual rest. Not the kind where you spend the whole time turning things over in your head.”
“I’ll try,” I said.
“Come back Thursday,” she said. “We’ll have soup.”
I squeezed her hand and left.
I was discharged that evening.
The doctor who saw me to the door said I’d been lucky—again, that word—and suggested I carry two epinephrine injectors from now on, not one. He said it the way doctors say things they have to say: matter-of-factly, without dwelling. I thanked him and signed the discharge forms.
In the parking lot, I sat in my car for a while before starting the engine. The hospital was on the edge of the city, and from where I was parked I could see a long reach of early-spring sky, that particular flat grey that goes on and on without feature. I’d always liked that sky, actually. There was something honest about it—no attempt at beauty, just a plain statement of winter light.
I thought about calling someone. There were people I could call—a handful of friends who would answer, who would come if I asked. But what I found, sitting in that grey light, was that I didn’t want to tell the story again. I’d told it in fragments to the paramedics, told it in medical specifics to the emergency doctor, told it in full and careful order to my grandmother. It had been told.
What I wanted—what couldn’t be provided—was for it not to be true.
But it was true. And that was the last thing I needed to reckon with before I could go home.
I had spent the drive to the hospital, the hours in the emergency bay, the call with my grandmother telling myself that I didn’t know for certain. That the almond could have been cross-contamination. That Harper could have made a terrible mistake. That the advance call to the dispatcher could have been well-intentioned, someone trying to convey context that came out wrong.
I was good at this. I had been practicing it for years—the charitable reading, the generous interpretation, the possibility that I was the difficult one for seeing things as they were rather than as people preferred them to be.
But sitting in that parking lot, in the plain grey light, I ran out of interpretations.
Harper had known my allergy since we were nine years old. She had known which bakery I trusted and why I trusted it—that my trust was specifically rooted in its allergy protocols, its separation of prep areas, the laminated statement behind the glass case. She had used that knowledge precisely: to deliver something I would accept without question, from a source I wouldn’t second-guess. And she had called ahead to the dispatcher, not to protect me but to preemptively discredit me, so that even my emergency would be read through the lens of drama and instability.
The pattern that had always been there—the party she hadn’t invited me to, the proxy she’d accepted without question, the birthday caption that erased my name—suddenly had a shape. It was a story she had been telling for years, a story in which she was the golden one and I was the shadow that made her shine brighter. All of those things had been chapters. The cupcakes were the chapter where the story mattered more to her than my life.
I sat with that until it stopped feeling like something that had just happened and started feeling like something that had always been true and I had simply not been ready to see.
Then I started the engine and drove home.
I drove home in the March light, that flat early-spring grey, and tried to locate what I was actually feeling—not what I thought I should feel, but what was actually there.
Not grief, exactly. Grief implies that something has been lost, and what I was experiencing was almost the opposite of loss. More like revelation. More like the strange, vertiginous relief of finally seeing clearly what has been blurry for so long you’ve stopped recognizing the blur as blur and started treating it as the natural state of things.
My family had made a particular calculation about me, I understood now. They had decided, at some point I couldn’t precisely locate, that I was the complicated one—the child who noticed things, who named things, who created friction by refusing to accept certain fictions as comfortable truths. Harper was the smooth surface. I was the one with edges. And families, when they choose, will always protect their smooth surfaces at the expense of their edges, because smooth surfaces are easier to maintain.
What I was also understanding—sitting in my car outside my building, not yet ready to go upstairs—was that I had participated in this. I had spent years trying to smooth my own edges down. Trying to be easier, quieter, less of a problem. I had mistaken accommodation for love and had tried to earn love by making myself more accommodating, not understanding that the question was not whether I was easy enough. The question was whether I was wanted at all.
Those are different problems. And you cannot solve the second one by working harder on the first.
That thought arrived simply, without ceremony, and I sat with it until it stopped feeling like a wound and started feeling like a fact. Facts can be worked with. Facts can be the basis of decisions. Wounds just bleed.
Upstairs, my apartment was quiet and ordinary.
My family had made a particular calculation about me, I understood now. They had decided, at some point I couldn’t precisely locate, that I was the complicated one—the child who noticed things, who named things, who created friction by refusing to accept certain fictions. Harper was the smooth surface. I was the one with edges. And families, when they choose, will always protect their smooth surfaces at the expense of their edges.
What I was also understanding—sitting in my car outside my building, unwilling just yet to go upstairs—was that I had participated in this. I had spent years trying to smooth my own edges down. Trying to be easier. Trying to take up less space, need less, be less of a problem. I had mistaken accommodation for love and had tried to earn love by becoming less difficult to accommodate.
It had not worked. It had not worked because what they wanted from me was not less difficulty but less existence. Less claim to things they had decided were Harper’s: the party, the proxy, the birthday caption, the full attention of the people who were supposed to have equal attention to give.
You cannot earn your way to being equally loved by people who have decided you are not.
That thought arrived simply, without drama, and I sat with it until it stopped feeling like a wound and started feeling like a fact. Facts can be worked with. Facts can be the basis of decisions. Wounds just bleed.
Upstairs, my apartment was quiet and ordinary. The cupcake box in the plastic bag on the counter. The single candle still in its wrapper beside it.
My phone buzzed. An unknown number. I almost didn’t answer.
I’m sorry, the text read. I didn’t think it would go that far. I just wanted… one day that was mine.
Harper.
I read it several times. I was looking for something in it—genuine remorse, acknowledgment of what she’d done, any recognition that what she’d wanted had almost killed me. I was looking for the kind of apology that means something, that costs something to make, that requires the other person to actually see what they’ve done.
What I found was: I didn’t think it would go that far.
Not: I know what I did. Not: I’m sorry I put nuts in your cupcakes. Not: I’m sorry I called ahead to undermine you.
Just: I didn’t think it would go that far. The apology of someone who got caught. The remorse of someone who is sorry about the outcome, not the act.
I held the phone for a long time. I thought about the years of shared birthdays, shared rooms, shared everything—the specific intimacy of being a twin, the way your life is braided with another person’s from before you can remember, the way you grow up having a witness, someone who is present for all of it from the beginning, someone who knows the version of you that existed before you had any say in who you were becoming.
That intimacy is supposed to be a gift. It is, when it’s mutual. When both people are holding the braid with care, treating the intimacy as the sacred thing it is—the shared knowledge, the shared history, the particular shorthand of people who grew up in the same rooms, who know each other’s faces so well they can read them across a crowded room.
What I had not understood until now was that the intimacy could be weaponized. That the person who knows you best is also, by definition, the person best positioned to harm you. She knew which bakery I trusted. She knew my allergy in its specific, precise detail. She knew how to build a version of me that would arrive at the dispatcher’s ear before my voice did. She knew all of it because she was my twin, because we had shared everything, because the intimacy that was supposed to protect us had become, in her hands, the means of the harm.
I thought about what I wanted to say. Not what would be right, or strategic, or what would make me look best in retrospect. What I actually wanted. What was true and necessary and mine to say.
You almost took more than a day from me, I typed. I need space. Don’t contact me again until I’m ready.
I pressed send. I set the phone down and did not pick it up again.
I unwrapped the candle. I found a match. I set the candle in the center of the kitchen table—where it could be seen, where it occupied real space, where it wasn’t tucked in a corner being modest about itself—and lit it.
The flame caught and steadied.
I stood at my kitchen table for a long moment, looking at it. The small, ordinary, undeniable fact of a birthday candle burning on a table in a quiet apartment on an evening in March.
Outside, the city hummed with its ordinary evening sounds: cars, voices from the street, the low frequency of a neighborhood settling into dusk. Ordinary life, carrying on. The world not particularly concerned with what had happened in one kitchen on one birthday—which is either the most terrible thing about the world or, if you hold it right, a strange kind of comfort. The world carries on. You carry on with it.
I thought about what my grandmother had said: Love is a verb. You have to do it on purpose, even when it’s inconvenient. I had been carrying that sentence since she’d said it, turning it over. She had been speaking about my parents, about the choice they had made not to love me with the same intentionality they’d applied to Harper. But I kept hearing it differently, kept reading it back to myself.
Love is a verb. I had to do it on purpose.
Not earn it. Not perform it. Not diminish myself to fit the space someone else decided I could occupy. Do it on purpose, as an act, as a choice made over and over in small ways—the candle on the table, the birthday said out loud, the refusal to let the day simply pass uncelebrated because the people who were supposed to celebrate it had decided it was inconvenient.
The chapter that had closed had closed itself. I hadn’t chosen it; it had simply arrived at its end, with a pink box and an advance phone call and a text about drama. There was grief in that, real grief, the kind that would come in waves for a while before it became something steadier. Twenty-five years of being a twin, of having that particular witness, of knowing someone’s handwriting the way you know your own. That loss was real and I wasn’t going to pretend it wasn’t.
But alongside it—present simultaneously, not canceling the grief but existing at the same time—was something else. A kind of clarity. A sense of being accurately located in my own life for the first time in a long time. I was not the dramatic one, not the unstable one, not the one who needed to be managed and minimized and kept at a convenient distance. I was the one who had told the truth. I was the one still standing.
I found a plate and put a single cupcake on it—not from the pink box, which was sealed in evidence plastic—but one I had in the back of my cabinet, bought weeks ago and forgotten, from a different bakery that I trusted for different reasons. I set it on the table beside the candle.
It wasn’t a party. It wasn’t what a twenty-fifth birthday is supposed to look like. There was no tent of fairy lights, no three-tier cake with gold lettering, no caption about being surrounded by everyone you love.
There was a candle burning on a table in a quiet apartment, and a person who had survived the day, and an understanding that surviving the day was not nothing. That being here, in possession of herself, clear-eyed and in her own kitchen on the other side of the worst birthday she’d ever had—that was something. That was, in fact, the thing.
“Happy birthday to me,” I said.
Louder than yesterday. Louder than the whisper in the morning when the day felt like an apology.
The flame held steady.
I let it burn a little longer. I did not rush to blow it out. I gave myself the full minute of the candle’s light, the small ceremony of it, because no one else was going to give it to me and I had decided—sitting in the parking lot of a hospital, in the early-spring grey, running out of charitable interpretations—that I was done waiting for things to be given.
I could give them to myself. I had been able to the whole time.
When I finally blew it out, the smoke rose in a thin curl toward the ceiling and dispersed.
I sat down at my kitchen table with the cupcake and ate it slowly, tasting it fully—this one safe, this one chosen by me, this one carrying nothing but what it was supposed to carry—and outside the city hummed on, indifferent and alive, and inside my apartment was quiet and mine.
Happy birthday to me.
And this time, for the first time all day—for the first time in longer than I wanted to admit—it sounded like a beginning.
Lila Hart is a dedicated Digital Archivist and Research Specialist with a keen eye for preserving and curating meaningful content. At TheArchivists, she specializes in organizing and managing digital archives, ensuring that valuable stories and historical moments are accessible for generations to come.
Lila earned her degree in History and Archival Studies from the University of Edinburgh, where she cultivated her passion for documenting the past and preserving cultural heritage. Her expertise lies in combining traditional archival techniques with modern digital tools, allowing her to create comprehensive and engaging collections that resonate with audiences worldwide.
At TheArchivists, Lila is known for her meticulous attention to detail and her ability to uncover hidden gems within extensive archives. Her work is praised for its depth, authenticity, and contribution to the preservation of knowledge in the digital age.
Driven by a commitment to preserving stories that matter, Lila is passionate about exploring the intersection of history and technology. Her goal is to ensure that every piece of content she handles reflects the richness of human experiences and remains a source of inspiration for years to come.