March 16

March 16.

Another birthday. Another year. I don’t feel happy, nor do I feel sad. It’s just a day, like all the ones before it. I wake up, and the air doesn’t feel any different. The sky doesn’t crack open with some divine revelation, nor does the wind whisper anything new to me. It’s just another morning, another stretch of hours to move through. And yet, for the first time, I feel old. Not in the way bones ache or skin surrenders to time, but in the way silence lingers a little longer, and memories weigh a little heavier.

I have never known how to act on my birthday. As a child, I would sit through the well-wishes, the cake, the careful attention, unsure of what expression to wear, as if joy was something I had to rehearse. Now, I don’t even pretend. I accept the messages, the calls, the posts, but they pass through me like water through cupped hands. I have never chased the thrill of birthdays, never counted down, never yearned for a moment to be celebrated. And yet, here I am, a year older, standing at the threshold of something I can’t quite name.

This birthday is different, though. It is the first time in fifteen years that I am celebrating with my twin, Stephen. Fifteen years apart, living separate lives, growing into separate people, and now, here we are—two souls born together, learning again how to exist in the same space. It feels surreal, almost foreign, like meeting someone who carries your reflection but not your footsteps.

We were just kids the last time we did this together. I barely remember the feeling, the details blurred by time, but I imagine there was laughter, a cake, maybe a shared wish spoken in secret. But what do we wish for now? What do we hold in the quiet between us? There is something beautiful and haunting about the way time separates and then returns people to each other, like waves that forget the shore only to find it again.

I wish I could say I feel something monumental, that this reunion fills me with overwhelming joy, but I don’t know if it does. It’s not sadness either. It’s something in between—a quiet acknowledgment of time lost and time given back. A knowing that we are not the same children we were, that life has carved its own paths through us. But still, we are here, and maybe that is enough.

A part of me wonders how many more birthdays will feel like this—like I am watching from a distance, like I am an observer in my own life. People say birthdays are about celebration, about love, about marking the passing of time with gratitude. But what if time does not feel like a gift? What if it feels like a reminder of all the things I am still figuring out, of all the versions of myself I have yet to understand?

I have spent years carrying questions I don’t have answers to. Maybe that’s what growing older really is—not finding the answers, but learning to live with the questions. Learning to exist in uncertainty without letting it consume me.

Somewhere, deep inside, there is a flicker of hope, a whisper that maybe this year will be different, that maybe I will surprise myself. Maybe I will find something worth celebrating, something that does not feel forced or borrowed. Maybe I will wake up one day and feel like I am exactly where I am meant to be. Maybe that is the real gift of time—not the years themselves, but the moments that teach us how to exist in them.

For now, I will sit in this feeling. I will let it be what it is without trying to shape it into something else. I will take today as it comes, without expectations, without pressure, without the weight of needing to feel more than I do.

Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to Stephen. We made it another year, in different ways, through different struggles, with different scars. And maybe that is something worth acknowledging, even if I don’t know how to celebrate it.

A year older. Fifteen years younger in time. Time moves forward, but maybe, just maybe, I am learning how to move with it.