A Year Older
By
: Elicuanan
Someone told me, from a time that I had forgotten about, that birthdays
are one of the most important events in anyone’s life. Right up
there with weddings, and all that jazz.
If you ask me, all Birthdays are just another reminder that you’re a
year closer to death.
And entire year older. An entire year’s worth of experiences that you would’ve traded just so
you could go back to the time when you didn’t know, and didn’t care.
I was born on the feast day of Thomas the Doubter. Typical.
I doubt if I ever could celebrate.
People say that we should take the bitter with the sweet. Alas, the
result is bittersweet and it leaves a horrible aftertaste.
Like a dead creature in your mouth. In your soul.
I will be a year older soon. With a new beginning.
I couldn’t care less.
I feel old. Tired and worn out. After only 18 years, I feel like an old
glove. An old glove that’s begging to be thrown into the
fire, just to put me out of my misery.
Birthday blues, people would say, my friends would say that I get them
every year. That’s because every year I have a birthday.
It is perhaps, easier for everyone to forget my birthday. But it is so
much more harder for me to forget it.
And the countdown that I am executing in my head is perhaps more
frightening that the countdown to the supposed end of the world. It’s the end
of one year of my existence and the beginning of another, bitter year.
18 years ago, on the 3rd of July, I burst into the world, a
purple suffocated thing with yellowish eyes. An alien.
And I am an alien still.
And I am tired of trying to defend my existence. Sometimes I just want
to lie down on the railroad track of life and let everything run me over.
Unfortunately, there always seems to be someone all too willing to save
me.
For once in my life, can’t I let the dragon win? Can I let the dragon
get the damsel in distress?
Hasn’t it occurred to these people that maybe, the maiden chained to the
rock is there of her own volition? Her massive death wish to
be consumed by the greatest monster of the deep?
Why must these heroes try to save me?
Maybe because, in the end, I call out
for help. I’m still afraid of the abyss.
It turns out that I still have a sense of self-preservation that I cannot
fully erase nor smother.
But I know, as the years go by, as I get a year older, and another year
older and another and another, and many more anothers,
it will fade.
And then maybe, the maiden at the rock will get her death wish, her
birthday wish.