Too much cake, that's my problem

I write this less from its necessity than because I feel it ought to be written for whatever posterity exists. No more than ten people will read it shortly after I post it, and that I am unlikely to revisit it. And yet, it needs to be here as one of those arguable turning points.

I somehow and much against my will have turned forty. It seems improbable, as though this is part of a surreal dream, that I am forty as much as I am secretly an angel charged with a spy mission for a galactic octopus. The math checks out, though. 2020-1980 persists in equaling 40 despite my best efforts.

I don't know how I would feel in a better year, where there was an excuse of friends and family to cosset this expected blow. In 2020, forty feels the same as everything: numb and disappointing, mainly as we pull again toward winter with only a tiny fraction of people vaccinated or likely to be before summer. I am forty. Christmas is coming. It is Tuesday. Thanksgiving was a few weeks ago. I made tacos Saturday. All these statements have comparable--which is to say minor--weight.

A party with friends might have at least allowed me to feign grateful embarrassment, yet have a few members of my community assure me that it really won't be that bad. Instead, Amber had to take on the burden of dragging me along through the preceding weekend, assuaging me that she will not be revolted at the idea of sharing her bed with a forty-year-old. It really isn't better to leap off a tall building onto strategically placed knives coated in poison for the boast of saying that I had never been a forty-year-old. Better to live a touch longer to absorb the feel of being forty to use in future writing.

She made me a cake with homemade, too-sweet frosting and bought me adequate-but-not-ideal sushi. She handed me a gift bag containing an enamel pin of Black Phillip (she gave me another of the Wendigo the day before because I was being mope). It also contained organic soap and spicy peanuts, the former a necessity she was giving me anyway and the latter a snack I shall save until I feel I need to remember the birthday and woman, though not the age.

I have surely had worse birthdays, which comes with having a winter birthday so close to Christmas. Snow or school holidays always gave a good excuse to skip my festivities, and I have had to smile through a good number of combination gifts. Omitting my age, it was not that bad. There were few expectations to disappoint.

Amber says that this may be the best decade of my life, though I find this specious. She says that I am not forty. I am how old my body thinks I am. Since I exercise daily, read and write avidly, eat relatively well, am thin, and cultivate social relationships, I am likely not close to as old as my driver's license says.

I went through a few existential crises in the past few years to reconcile where I was in my life, settling on benign nihilism instead of a floozy half my age and a sports car. Nothing matters; I will die, the universe will die, nothing can stop that, so I might as well be happy. I considered this looking at the crises in their eyes rather than running from them, but it is not wholly satisfying on one's fortieth birthday.

I can enumerate things that I wish I would have better accomplished by this point. Most of these pertain to literary success, but I am working harder toward this than when I was traditionally published. Over the weekend, I published two pieces and, though eBay, sold one of my books unexpectedly. I have a Patreon with a solitary fan. I cannot promise this had something to do with my birthday candle wish, though. It would not be original if that were the case.

When I return to work, my supervisor informs me that one of my former students, whom we had multiple times starting when he was twelve, was shot and killed on my birthday. His body was found in the street, bleeding out. The police arrested someone but still call the crime unsolved. He was only seventeen, and a baby-faced seventeen at that. This should give me some too-convenient perspective, how I am irritable about reaching this milestone, and this boy didn't even make it to twenty. I am not feeling like using his premature and violent death as my object lesson on gratitude or some happy button to this entry.

last watched: Cells at Work
reading: Piercing the Darkness