Birthdays and Crying, Changing, not Dying
By Georgia Bond
When I was seven, I wanted to be an author. I wrote stories and poems and songs so I could call myself a writer, but I also went to soccer practice and acted in the school play and cried. I cried often, but most memorably, the night before my eighth birthday.
I dreaded my birthday when I was turning thirteen. I still wrote, just not as much, and wasn’t ready to be a teenager. I dreamed of going to college and law school and majoring in many things, while still being too scared of the change. The fear of my birthday happens most years, whether turning eight or thirteen or twenty, I am always scared of the change.
I turned twenty last month and cried when my alarm clock beeped twice that midnight. It felt less like a birthday and more like a funeral, but I wasn’t sure who had died. I’ve been to this funeral many times before. Every year I wake up to mourn whoever I once was. Every year, I always manage to cry for her.
Georgia’s 20th birthday cake. Photo credit to the author.
I want to be an author again. I’m in college studying English, just English, but I take a philosophy class, too. My professor taught us about personal evolution one day, saying that he has evolved, but who he really is has never changed. He has a PhD now, but still prefers strawberry taffy to banana and doesn’t like watching scary movies. I take a philosophy class, but still hate my birthday.
When I look out the window and it rains, I feel the same way that I did looking out the window into the rain as a child. My favorite songs are by bands my parents played in our kitchen in my childhood home and I love writing, just like I did. I’m a little taller, I’m a little smarter, and my groups of friends are different, but I’ll always cry on my birthday. That girl crying is twenty and thirteen and seven all at once, feeling the culmination of emotions from a life lived and living. I don’t feel fearful of the way I’ve changed, for all of my growing has taken me down many necessary paths and turns. At the end of the day I am the same person I’ve always been and that is who I will always be. The more things change, the more they remain the same.