09/26/2009
A baby sits on a high chair, her knees bouncing and basking in the early autumn sun. Her legs tremble even more as she eagerly awaits the colorful, icing-slathered cake she sees in her mother’s hands. Her mother wears a green Abercrombie and Fitch shirt.
I wear that shirt now. Fourteen, no, fifteen years later.
The child’s eyes widen as the cake is placed before her—a strange, flickering light dances on the candle. Curiosity is the dominant force of decision in her one-year-old brain; she reaches for the strange light—and quickly pulls her clenching fist back, realizing the light is unfriendly. For a moment, she gasps.
The loved ones whom she cannot love laugh, “Make a wish!”
I don’t respond.
09/26/2015
A little girl adorned with a bedazzled shirt and hot pink leggings awkwardly stands in front of her class; her demeanor is in stark contrast to the gaudiness of her clothes. She smiles, enjoying the attention, but nervously digs her hands into the bottom of her shirt and fidgets with the sequins.
“Are you one, are you two, are you three…” they chant. The girl is confused, unaware of this tradition she never knew in Alabama. “Are you seven? Are you eight….” The class laughs.
“What do you want for your birthday, Micah?” Her teacher asks, gripping her around the shoulders and kneeling to her level of 4 feet tall.
Make a wish.
“A friend.”
When I was a little girl, I proudly announced my superlative talent: making friends. I wonder where that went; what changed at the green age of seven?
9/26/2012
“I want a sister.”
9/26/2017
“I want a cat.”
9/26/2023
“I want a guitar.”
Make a wish. Make a wish. Make a wish.
Every year, we say, I want, I want, I want. An anniversary of fun and cake becomes a tradition of greed, a custom deeply intertwined in our materialistic culture. Do they celebrate birthdays in other parts of the world? How so?
Why does one culture celebrate what another ignores?
9/26/2024
I feel no different than how I did yesterday morning—tired.
I take my mom’s old video recorder and point the camera at myself, the girl who wears the same Abercrombie and Fitch shirt her mother did just 16 years ago.
“Good morning,” the girl says. Her lengthy yawn and red eyes say otherwise. “My name is Micah McClarty. I’m sixteen years old. For my birthday wish, I want to… know. Things. What should I do? Where should I go? What does my future look like?” The girl stares into the camera as if awaiting a response. “I guess you’ll see me in ten years.”
She walks downstairs and finds two helium balloons at the kitchen table. She smiles. She puts a sweater over her mother’s green shirt, a shirt that may have been the wish of her mother years before.
