July Birthdays

July Birthdays
By H.E. Baker
When I was eight, I told my best friend I wasn't afraid of dying and she ran away to the swing set on our elementary school playground and didn't talk to me for a week. It was my fault. I should've run to that swing set with her.
Ten years ago, my favorite album came out and I'm trying to recollect the memories of what it felt like to listen to it for the first time while walking the halls of my middle school. The walls were a butterscotch yellow, but I wouldn't know if they changed. It's been a while. I was eleven.
I've often pondered why some clouds seem to move faster than others and I've often wondered in a melodramatic fashion if anyone will truly want to love me. A yearning to be understood and a yearning to be eternally misunderstood haunts me every day and if that isn't a screaming proclamation that I've never been afraid to die and I never will be... then I don't know what is.
I watched as my best friends held hands with boys at football games and smoked weed with them in the bathrooms while I sat outside and became acquaintances with a boy who had blonde hair and gave me the album Give Up by The Postal Service for my July birthday. First kisses are fated and he melted away into the summer like I expected him to.
I've often pondered what it would be like to grow up in the suburbs. I'd run wild in the summer with sparklers and parties on the Fourth of July. "It's a white trash bash!" I'd watch my friends drink cough syrup and I'd cry to movies and I'd wish I wasn't so emotional.
I wish there weren't any definitions. If someone had to define me, I'd feel like a lab rat. I'd be put in a box and told what to do and society would expect me to dress a certain way. I've had words choked down my throat by the mad scientists who say, "We are accepting of everyone," yet they will subconsciously respect me less and less when our views are clashing. "We are accepting of everyone as long as they agree with us," they say as the knife stabs into my wrist. Pulses are useless, anyway. I've never been afraid to die. The deterioration of age.
I cried at that first football game. I sat by the brick wall and the boy with blonde hair gave me his sweatshirt and it wasn't enough. It was never enough until I convinced myself that I was enough. I was enough. I am enough.
In eighth grade, I joined the girls' basketball team and I sucked and everyone knew it. I imagined myself as a bird and I imagined what the rooftop of the middle school building looked like.
Speaking of which, I've often pondered who is reuniting and who is saying farewell at an airport. I've always loved airports.
Growing up, there were woods surrounding the edges of my house. The woods held too many secrets in my town. My friend once told me that people died in the woods all the time and the town just kept it secret. My dog ran away one too many times and came back with bones. I've heard stories of my friends getting wasted. The stars were in the skies. The stars were in their eyes. As for me, I've always liked forests.
I once had a boy tell me I was a bad kisser. He led me up onto a rooftop downtown one night. We watched the Christmas parade that was held one day after Thanksgiving. The floats floated by and their Christmas lights oozed onto the mountain top we scurried on. We fell on rocks and walked across a wooden beam and were transported into another world once we landed on the rooftop. I watched the parade and I was happy I wasn't one of the many people to be on the ground. It is incredible to see a situation from an entirely different viewpoint. I would tell the mad scientists that, because I've seen what they've seen from their viewpoint. I know a few of them have seen my viewpoint before. It is depressing that we will still never agree.
I remember in the fourth grade playing tag with my friends. I raced across the soccer field, feeling like I was flying. My Chuck Taylors could barely stay on the ground. Joining the track team in middle school was a much better decision than joining the basketball team.
One of my favorite memories is the night where I sat around a living room and watched my friend play punk rock songs on an acoustic guitar. That's where I first had my realization.
I've always pondered why I've felt a strange yearning to live by an ocean, yet I hate swimming pools. I know I am not the only one who feels like this.
What is so incredibly strange to me are the quotes that tell you that every little moment is leading you to a moment that is yet to come. It's weird to me to think about how people are anxiously waiting for a moment where the golden haze of a life that was worth living will envelop them as they look across some destined library and see their future wife for the first time, or how they will cross that finish line at the Olympics realizing they won the gold medal. Then, what?
I used to believe this. I believed it with all my soul.
I sat around a fire pit with a boy once. It was my freshman year of college. We watched an eclipse light up the night sky and I thought about all these things. I thought about how my best friend died and how I wished I could've run to that swing set and told her that as much as I wasn't afraid of death, I was deathly afraid of losing her. I wish I could've grabbed her red hair as we ran through the woods in an effort to not let go.
"I need you so much closer," my favorite band sings as I march perilously on through the hormonal ups and downs of middle school.
I run to my own rhythm. I walk on knowing that there is a reason, there is a precipice of sorts- a precipice that marks the ultimate decay of my life and I never know when that drop-off is coming. I never know when my life will end. I am enough and my personality will forever be incredible and worth loving because I am fearfully and wonderfully made and if you do not believe that about yourself- if you cannot understand that you are an incredible being made of gas and water and fibrous tissue and vertebrae, then you won't ever know. We are forever flexible to the changes of the world. We are forever changed by the changes of the world. We, as a human race, have lived through wars and heartbreak and childbirth and abuse and neglect and terrorism, and yet, here we are.
I still listen to Give Up by The Postal Service.
I can't tell you why I cried at that first football game and I can't tell you why I love oceans so much.
What I do know is this: there is no big moment.
If you're expecting to meet the love of your life in some big way, you won't. If you can't get a grip on what will happen after you get married, then you need to get a better perspective. Look at the bigger picture! Stare a little longer! I will scream this from the top of an auditorium. I remember canary yellow paint under my fingernails after finishing painting a set for my high school's production of Les Miserables. I remember the hearts I've broken and I remember the way he looked at me when he said, "You're like a sister to me."
There is no big moment.
There is no big moment.
There is no big moment.
Life is a collection of freaking insignificant, yet beautiful moments and in this way they are all noteworthy. They are all worthy of attention. They are all remarkable. Do you ever get a thought every once in a while in a captivating moment where the sun melts through the window as your best friend paints her nails black or where your friend is playing blink-182 on his acoustic guitar at 4AM or where you wake up in a tent surrounded by the people you love as you eat marshmallows for breakfast? Have you ever seen the forest at 7AM? Have you ever watched people reunite in an airport? Have you ever noticed how beautiful it is to be alone? Have you ever thought, "I want to freeze this moment and never experience life after this." I'd be content to die in moments like that. Life is a series of these moments. It's not all leading up to one, big moment.
"But I'm thinking of what Sarah said: that love is watching someone die. So who's gonna watch you die?" That's what my favorite band sings.
When I was eight, I told my best friend I wasn't afraid of dying. The leukemia stole her body when we were ten and I feel that the collection of moments listed are some of the most beautiful things to happen to me. If I ran to that swing set with her, I could've apologized for what I said, but it wouldn't have been true. I will forever feel that lump in my throat that begs me to shout, "Stay," but for whatever reason, I shout into the void, I shout into the person who I have become, I shout to the memory of my friend running to the swing set and I say, "Don't you dare let this pass. Don't let it pass."