Flake

Today I turned 26. Nothing too exciting. I am lakeside in a house I rented for a week, chillin’ in the new portable hammock that my father got for me, avoiding the flood that is currently the state of Illinois. There’s a fire pit out back and I bought the square-shaped ‘mellies that are created specifically for successful s’more assembly. I thought it would be fun to throw it back to the very beginning of my days. Let y’all start to understand why this day is so important to not just me but humanity.

The early 1990s: Jane and Larry have successfully had a daughter through in-vitro fertilization. They name her Emily. She’s just okay.

*I had mentioned maybe one other time that my mother’s appendix ruptured when she was a little leading to her inability to get preggo the traditional way. Enter, Science.  

Anyway, the first child was sorta cute but people tend to want one of each. Or just more than one. So the kids can watch each other, probably. My parents continue to try IVF for a second baby. Failures.Tears. Money. Exhaustion. I’d be sad about this but when it finally did work again, YA GIRL WAS BORNED. Two babies were probably enough so knowing that there wouldn’t be a third, they insisted on using as many letters as they could in my name. My mom is the person who calls children by the full name that they were given at birth. I secretly think she began to regret all four of those syllables by the time I was 3.  

May 18, 1994, is my birthday. It was two days before my older sister’s second birthday. I strongly believe that this made her irrelevant and has caused a lot of her animosity towards me over the years. My mother loves to tell the story of how I was almost killed during a very dramatic birth, but all of these things lead back to the facts: I am a miracle. 

This was the early 90’s people. We’re talking about new technology to make babies in tubes. I know I’m going to get this wrong (sorry mom) but I was like the fifth try and Emily wasn’t the first shot either. I am the sacred child who made it. My mom won’t shorten my name, but she does call me HRH which obviously stands for Her Royal Highness. I wasn’t named after the fucking queen. I AM THE QUEEN. And I acted as such, gaining my infamous nickname. 

Birthdays are a celebration of your birth. Celebration of your life. Celebration of the fucking miracle that you are. When you are this conceited, (can you blame me though?) this day is the day that you are the most important human on the planet. And I love me some cake and presents. So my whole upbringing was Christmas, where we got the coolest shit, and then our birthdays in late spring, which was usually one big gift of our choosing. I’d be bummed if I was one of the people who is born anywhere near Christmas. Two of the best days a year need to be spread out for proper planning and non-combination gifts. A Christmas present that is also your birthday gift? Seriously, no. 

I spread my love of birthdays to the people closest to me. If you are any of my ex-boyfriends (sup), you’d know that I have never dated someone and not thrown an absolute extravaganza for their birthday. Friends and family too.  My mom’s 60th (which hasn’t even happened yet because she’s 45), was huge. I mean, we fly people in for these events. I love a good birthday. 

So we fast forward to 2018. That awful human that we don’t need to name, was truly amazing to me until said event last May. He took me to Paris for my 24th birthday. Have you spent any of your birthdays IN the Eiffel Tower, drinking the best wine that exists on this planet, and eating pastries on pastries? The night before we saw the Moulin Rouge and that was undeniably the best night of my life. I started my 24th year incredibly champagne drunk. In Paris. Did I mention that’s where we were? Paris, France. It’s in Europe. 

This carried on the fantastic birthday tradition where one day a year, your dreams come true. You can have anything you want, do anything you want, and just bask in the celebration that you’re alive and because of that, people give you gifts. 

I’ll break this down for you in case you haven’t been following along. May 15, 2019, undeniably the worst day of my life. “Severe personal trauma” and all that. Not great. When is my birthday again? Oh right, May 18th. There was a dinner in Tampa planned, a reservation for the dessert room at Bern’s, dresses had been purchased, bags were packed. That didn’t happen. 

What did happen is I woke up on my 25th birthday at my Mom’s house where I had been brought by my father so I wasn’t alone in an empty apartment. My sister had to work. I had 0 plans for the day. I was supposed to be at our niece’s baptism well over a thousand miles away. My mom had been out of town for work. She didn’t know yet that she’d be on a flight back that evening. I was still in a state of shock from three days prior and trying to grasp the concept of living through hell.

I would not wish this level of pain on my worst enemy. I’m trying not to go back there so I won’t make an effort to describe the feeling. I wasn’t a fucking person. I didn’t want to die, but I wanted the pain to stop. I wanted to wake up from the nightmare.

Long story short, I went catatonic (completely inconsolable) and my mom’s house was soon filled with the most calendar worthy cops and paramedics. Hours later I was being torn from my father’s arms in tears and wheeled up from the ER to the psychiatric floor where I would be held for the rest of the weekend. I cried hysterically and kept saying “it’s my birthday” and I realized that I was acting like the crazy person they thought they were “treating”. 

Anyone else have a stellar 25th? 

Honestly, after the way my 24th went...IN PARIS, I probably deserved a bummer year.

*For those of you who have never been on a psych hold, you know, in crazy town, the place is self-harm proof. No drawstrings in my sweatpants, no use of a fucking pencil without supervision. They don’t automatically give you plastic utensils to eat with. That’s a special request. And I know that there have been so many people who have managed to kill themselves with a plastic fucking fork, so I get it. Oh wait, that’s never happened (and if it did, someone was super determined so it was probably for the best).

When I first got up to that floor and was still adjusting to the idea of losing my free will, I got to have a nice lady, (I'm sure her name was Karen), watch me strip so she could see all of my piercings and determine if I could take any of them out and kill a bitch. Karen was not the hot paramedic who had to watch me change at my mom’s that morning, before putting me in an ambulance that didn’t have subs or a phone charger. I guess you could summarize my 25th birthday as a lot of stripping with 0 alcohol involved.

It’s not a happy story. It’s a dark mark on my twenty-something years of successful birthdays. I have lowered my expectations as I got older because that wasn’t the first (and probably won’t be the last) birthday celebration that didn’t really go as planned. That whole COVID-19 thing really threw a wrench in our lives this year and I didn’t get to be around all of my people. Thankfully, I don’t like anyone as much as I like laying in the sun next to a large body of water- while drinking. 

Turns out this is a real thing: my special talent in life is that I feel emotional pain significantly worse than others. That, and the whole sensitive hearing thing. I blame it all on the fact that test-tube babies were sort of a new situation when they were making me. I guess it’s like saying you just get disappointed by things that devastate me. Worse things have happened to people. If you wouldn’t have told me, I would’ve continued to assume that my feelings were rather mutual. Either way, that’s just super awesome. If I’m looking forward to something, even menial, and it doesn’t happen it really gets to me. I’m basically just a huge cry baby who is afraid of balloons and fireworks. This is what I know about myself after 26 years. At least I'm fucking hilarious.

"Cause no one, no not, no one

Likes to be let down"