I hate
birthday daylogs. I don't really know why, I've done them before (I thought) and I generally don't read daylogs anyway and it seems odd to pick on the birthday ones.
What's that about?
But today could have been my birthday, although I'm not legally 21 'till tomorrow. I think my boys are gonna get me drunk all weekend, my girlfriend is jealous (it seems right and natural somehow, for a girlfriend to be jealous of the boys, even though I've been the girlfriend jealous of the boys I can't quite sympathise).
My aunt and my mom have both sent me photographs of me as a child with their birthday cards. In one I am about three, almost invisible behind a giant old Smith Corona electronic typewriter, which I guess is something I occasionally need to be, hiding behind a keyboard. The other is me at 18 months, looking confused at the camera holding a red pen awkwardly in my left hand. Always the left hand. I put those pictures on my wall at my desk under the picture of me at 4 or 5 sitting at a table in between my mom and my late grandmother. What we are doing is out of the shot, but my mom is holding me on her lap while we do whatever it is the three of us are looking at. I like to think it involves pens and paper, but of course I can't remember. You never remember the stuff there's already evidence for. I don't know why.
I look at these pictures and I am not smiling in any of them, although I think maybe that's a coincidence. I always assume that I wasn't fucked up yet, that there was nothing wrong with me until events spiraled sickenly out of my control when I was 5 or 6 or 7 or something I can't remember. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I soaked up the family violence and confusion from the begining and so didn't smile often. I cling to the idea that only one or two things hurt me, I'd rather think I was just afraid of cameras, like I still sort of am.
It's sort of perverse really, wallowing in bad times on your birthday, I'd like to put a lid on it, but that isn't working anymore. It doesn't seem fair to have to suffer a little bit while everyone else wants to celebrate, it doesn't seem fair that I can't tell myself it wasn't that bad anymore, even when I don't want to think about it. What I've found from opening the lid on shit is that there is some graditude in with everything else you let out. It's a peculiar kind, not for something easily named or passed on, but it's very real. After all the evils in the world flew out of Pandora's box, hope came out too.
That's all I want right now anyway, is this little corner of quiet and hope and gratitude. I think it will be waiting when I sober up.