Happy Birthdeath

An essay to greet my 33rd Birthday.

I wrote this essay/momentary memoir in 2021. It was and is incredibly precious to me. These pages were the first witness to this most challenging part of my story.

My feelings about the events shared here have changed a bit in the years since (you can read some of that here), but the way these words poured from me is no less a treasure to my soul.

I’m sharing it here, for you, but not for free. It cost me everything to write, in some ways, and I feel obliged to honor that cost in my choice to publish it only for paid subscribers.

Thank you for the honor of your witness.

TW: Suicide, death and other mature content

I started smoking— mini cigars, with that clove and tobacco smell I’d forever loved in movies and through the pages of books— a few days before my 33rd birthday.

It was a kind of compromise I’d made with Suicide, a character in my story who’d become a regular visitor in the last three years: Alright fine, I won’t cave to the darkness and off myself suddenly, but if I have to be here, I’m going to do it with a stick of badassery and bitterness hanging from my lips, and you can’t keep me from hoping that it knocks a few years off my time. 

The funny thing was, with a cigarette in my mouth, the thought of eighty or ninety years here didn’t sound quite as bad.