Birthday Reflections

As I get older, I find that my birthdays bring about contemplation. This year I've been marveling over how much one's life can change, and how much one person can remain the same.

Two years ago today, I had just finished celebrating my birthday as a truly single woman - no fiances, no boyfriends, not even a complicated romantic entanglement - for the first time in a decade at least. At long last, I had made my peace with the idea that romantic love was simply not meant for me. I would have a life filled with friends and adventures and constant travel. The wind would be my home, and when I was old and feeling alone, those memories would be enough. But there would be no great love story for me.

By the next spring, I was married. In a matter of months, the entire course of your life can change. Everything you thought you knew can change. So here I sit, two years later, getting used to how it sounds when someone asks my age and I tell them "thirty-two" while my husband sleeps in the next room and I sip coffee with a dog sleeping at my feet. There is a great love story for me after all.

But as much as things can change in a matter of moments, so they can stay the same for years and years and years. I think of this because I received a text message on my birthday, "Happy birthday to one of my favorite goth kids." That one really made me smile. Twenty some-odd years have gone by and I'm still the spooky girl in all black, watching "Beetlejuice" and wanting to be Lydia, reading ghost stories, dancing to the Cure. Surely my take on gothic style has changed over the years; but my love for all things black and velvet and lace, for dark eyes and blood red lips, for black hair teased high and V-point bangs, those things have not changed. And now, as I find myself firmly in my thirties, this thought comes as a comfort. That as much as life can change, and we with it, there can be some part of you that is eternal. That has always been what it is, and always will be.

So! As I still recover from the revelry of my birthday celebration Friday night, I raise a toast to the strange kids who grew to be strange adults. To the artists who never let life take from them the passion to create. To those who are who they are, without apology. To those who will not compromise what they are and what matters to them because the world tells them that they should.

We are the music makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams;—

World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world for ever, it seems. 

( Arthur O'Shaughnessy) 

Cheers!