I promise I'm not always like this

On being sad on your birthday

I’ve made my own birthday cake for the last six years. Almond cake filled with lemon curd made in my too-hot apartment. Chiffon cake covered in Swiss meringue buttercream. Lemon olive oil cake with whipped cream. I guess it wasn’t really the last six years—in 2020 my best friend K made me a galette that we ate at the river. I ran in circles holding a heavy rock, watched the sun set over the water, went home alone and sat on my fire escape. In 2021 I turned 30 in Mexico, no cake despite R’s best efforts finding one in the small surf town we were staying at.

In 2018, A made me a strawberry cake and threw me a tiny birthday party in the house she lived off Belmont street. My ex-husband and I had broken up two days prior and half the people at the party knew and the other half didn’t. In high school his mom made my birthday cakes, angel food cake with whipped cream and strawberries. After college, J made my birthday cakes. Then she moved to LA and now we’re not really friends anymore, anyways.

In bed I tell R that I don’t want to make my birthday cake this year. He tells me I have to, because I always have, and I tell him I haven’t always and anyways I’m feeling lonely and sorry for myself. I don’t even have a plan, or ingredients, I don’t have the desire to make myself anything. Still, the next day I go to the grocery store and buy sprinkles and heavy whipping cream and buttermilk. I find a recipe for homemade funfetti.

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R and I go to the river. We’re reading the same book, his copy is a hardcover, mine a paperback. (The book is Appleseed by Matt Bell, we’re reading it for Tiny Book Club. We call it Tiny Book Club since there are only three members, and this year we’re reading long books. Big book, Tiny Book Club.) The water is cold but it’s so shimmering hot out that when we jump in, it feels like relief. Like we can finally exhale. Sometimes I think the only time I feel calm, neutral, even keeled, is floating in cold river water with my ears submerged, looking at the sky.

It’s so hot out that the room temperature butter isn’t creaming, but melting. I put the entire bowl in the freezer. After the butter is creamed and the eggs have been beaten in and the flour and milk have been added in alternating increments, I measure out the sprinkles and pour them over the batter. I stop for a second and think about how beautiful it looks, that I should take a photograph. I have this instinct often, usually when I’m not near my camera or can’t stop to photograph anything. Like at the river, one hand submerged under the rippling water, the other hand hovering over the surface so that its shadow overlaps, so that I’m touching myself but not touching myself. I think, this would make an amazing photograph. Then I think, but how would I hold the camera. Both hands are integral to the scene. I think I could ask R to photograph it, but my camera is at the top of the rocks, and there is so much water between us.

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I used to keep a journal of all the birthday cakes I baked. With the recipes, and who they were for, and how old they were turning. M turning 27, chocolate cake with pistachio Italian meringue buttercream. R turning 39, chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream. K turning 33, funfetti that we ate on the bluffs the summer before I moved. I like making birthday cakes for my friends, but maybe it’s just that I like feeling important enough to bake them a cake. As if it secures my spot in their life, it means I don’t have to worry about them leaving me. Which isn’t even true, I’ve made birthday cakes for people who I’m not friends with anymore. I stopped updating the journal at some point, even though I kept baking cakes, but just for me and R, since we moved away from all the people I’m close enough to make birthday cakes for. Maybe it feels silly to only write the recipes for ours, or maybe I’ve halted all the practices that used to be important to me, maybe I don’t want a record of this time, maybe I’m depressed.

After I photograph the bowl with the sprinkles, and fold them in, after the batter is divided into two pans and the pans are put into the hot hot hot oven, I dip a spoon into the leftover batter and coat it in sprinkles. I take a photograph of the spoon. Taking pictures is like writing—once I start it’s easy to keep going. The words stacking up on the page, the shutter clicking. It’s getting started that’s the challenge. I photograph the sink with its dirty dishes, the cracked egg shell, the beaters coated in whipped egg whites. I take the bowl up to R so he can taste the batter. At the end of the night when the cakes are cool I wrap them in plastic wrap. Now that the cakes are baked, I don’t want to decorate them. In bed again, I tell R how much I don’t want to decorate them. I don’t want to spend hours on my birthday making frosting and smoothing it over the cakes and chopping strawberries to squish between the layers.

It’s not that I don’t want to do it, but maybe that I’m too sad to do it. I don’t have enough friends in this tiny town that we live in to eat this cake, even though I halved the recipe and baked it in tiny 6” pans. For so many years my birthday cake was a fun project I thought about and planned out. This year it just feels sort of depressing. I tell R that if we lived near my friends, someone could buy me a cake from a cute bakery, or if I made it, they would exclaim over it and I would be proud, there would be enough people I knew to sing me happy birthday. It feels ridiculous to be this sad about my birthday cake, when I’m turning 34, and I want to ignore it completely.

I ask R if he’ll decorate it—or maybe he offers first, I don’t remember. I tell him I already bought the ingredients for the frosting, that he can do whatever he wants. I tell him I don’t care if he gets frustrated with the cake and mashes it up into a bowl. He asks if he can color the frosting. He formulates beverage recipes for a living, creating with flavors is second nature to him. I tell him about the strawberries and he gets excited, he already has a plan in mind. This is why I like making cakes for other people, somehow it’s easier to make them happy, impress them, only consider their tastes and desires. So what if I don’t like peanut butter and chocolate. I don’t need to have an opinion about it.

So often the frantic thought I don’t know who I am anymore!!! runs through my head and I have to tell it to shut up. First of all, yes I do. Second, who even cares. It doesn’t matter if I know or don’t know who I am, I’m here and I’m driving to the thrift store and I’m running my hands over the shirts, feeling for 100% cotton or silk or maybe even cashmere. I’m trying on dresses that don’t fit and I’m listening to the same Carly Rae Jepson album over and over again and I’m unlocking the door to find my cat waiting for pets on the rug, and to her it really doesn’t matter if I’m having an identity crisis, as long as I’m there to brush her under her chin how she likes.

Everyone—like 8 people—are wishing me a happy birthday and hoping that I’m having a magical day, that I’m doing something fun, that it’s amazing. I open the texts and wait to respond, don’t know how to condense my loneliness into a text that won’t alarm them, make them worry. Or maybe it’s me that’s worried I’ll confess my sadness and it won’t change anything. What can anyone really say from such a distance. I was the one who left, after all.

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I forget that R can see my location on his phone, when he sees that I’m almost home he texts me don’t look in the fridge! He’s finished decorating the cake. When we’re both home he opens the door to the fridge dramatically, and inside there is a pink cake with a lemon stuck into the edge like a drink, covered in pink sprinkles, 3 and 4 candles in the top. It’s strawberry lemonade flavor. He feeds me a blob of leftover frosting. It’s messy and beautiful and perfectly earnest.

We make grilled pizza and salad and strawberry cocktails. We open a bottle of Lambrusco. I’m 34 and my life is so much larger and so much smaller than I thought it would be. I’m happier and more sad than I thought I would be. I’m in every way less certain than I thought I would be. Maybe I counted too much on age to smooth out the rough anxious edges of me. Gave too much brain space to the thought I don’t know who I am anymore!!! Tried too hard to ignore it, or else to bend to it’s will. I open the letter R has written me, which contains an envelope with two tickets to a Christmas Mannheim Steamroller concert. The gift is so silly, something only I would love, and I cry.

R insists on taking the cake to the bar. I’m embarrassed, don’t want to appear as though I care about my birthday even though I painfully care about my birthday. We’re friends with the bartender, she makes me a cosmo and lights the candles on the cake, which is already melting because it’s still so hot out. R has called another friend to come meet us. My guarded heart insists that we are only sort of friends. I’m feeling stubborn, even though R reminds me that the only way you make friends is by trying to make friends. I’m 34 and I’m still so scared of rejection. I want my friends here, the ones who know me, who would understand why tickets to Mannhiem Steamroller are such a Brittany gift.

The cake tastes exactly like strawberry lemonade. I tell R this is going to be the new tradition. I’ll bake the cake layers, he’ll make frosting and decorate them. I drink another cosmo. I think, justice for cosmos! I drink too much to make up for feeling sad, which is a terrible idea, especially when you’re 34. I hate drinking too much, hate not feeling like myself, hate that I am sad on my birthday, which has on the whole not been a bad day, has in fact been a beautiful day made even more beautiful by a partner who has cared for my sensitive heart with such tenderness.

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Cleaning off the coffee table the day after my birthday I find a small notebook that contains a spread with two lists. What I’m struggling with right now/Things I’m keeping up with etc. Both lists contain the most basic things. Sleeping. Walks. Drinking enough water. Eating enough. Getting dressed. Reading. Budgeting. Making the bed. Excelling at work. Showering. Both lists contain the foundational aspects of being a human. The lists are evenly split. If I wrote the same lists today, they’d be nearly the same. I thought if I catalogued the things I was struggling with I could begin to be better at them. Like, the first step is admitting you have a problem. I just forgot there were other steps after that.

At the gym I accidentally click on a song I don’t know when I’m searching for something on Spotify. It’s from an album released in 2018, the year I had strawberry cake for my birthday. The song is the last one on the album, I’m starting at the end. I think it’s a been a long time since I listened to an album I didn’t know anything about. I think I’ve found myself once again in the pattern of trying to get back to myself, instead of moving forward. I think I’m thinking about myself too much. I usually am.

on my 34th birthday, in the studio

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Unrelated (& related) thing I’m loving from the real world:

• “This Time” by Tanukichan, the song I accidentally played at the gym the day after my birthday.

• It’s August & I’m once again attempting to complete The Sealey Challenge, which is a challenge to read a book of poetry a day for the whole month. So far I’ve read Pathemata by Maggie Nelson, Clasp by Doireann Ni Ghríofa, nell by Ally Young, The Best Poems of Jane Kenyon, and Self-Portrait as Homestead by Jeri Theriault, which is my favorite so far.

  

• This piece of ephemera that came with July’s Print Club by Alyssa Lee, which is a quote from Morgan Harper Nichols.

• Mostly, I’ve been loving my cat (even when she hates having her picture taken.)

  

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Xo,
B