Birthday

Forever young

We fell in love in a rush, the way some people only do once in a lifetime. Within a couple of months we knew we would marry. Who are you, her friends and family asked? We chose a date at the very end of the year because it felt right—closing one chapter, opening the next, the millennium. The venue she loved and wanted (Avianto) was free two days before her birthday. I grinned and told everyone it was deliberate: I wanted to marry a younger woman, even if only by forty-eight hours. She laughed, rolled her eyes, and kissed me anyway. That joke became part of our story, repeated at every anniversary with the same mock indignation and the same sparkle in her eyes.

She died at forty-one, in August, just days after my own birthday, gifting me a chimenea, of which I had spoken about many times after a trip to Acapulco . The cruelty of the calendar stings—how it kept moving while she stopped and how the month of August now resonates.

I remember our wedding day in perfect detail: the heat of the candles, the carefully selected flowers, the way she walked toward me with commitment and confidence. But her birthdays now are different. I do not picture her growing older. I refuse the thought. There are no candles for her anymore, no new lines around her eyes, no grey hairs to tease her about. She is locked in light, forever the age she was when she left—vibrant, mischievous, impossibly alive. She stepped out of time at forty-one, and time can’t touch her anymore.

Birthdays are for the living. They mark another trip around the sun, another year of growing and changing and becoming. I don’t mourn the birthdays she never reached. I celebrate the ones she had, and I keep her exactly as she was: young, luminous, laughing at my terrible jokes. Forever the age she was when love still felt invincible.

Eternity has no need for birthdays
She is not forty-two, forty-five, fifty or sixty-four.
She is forty-one, always.
Forever young.
Forever…