Since entering a new decade, I have desired to celebrate my birthday alone.
Twenty-nine was a blip in San Juan, Puerto Rico where I suffered the consequences of excessive partying in an infamous locals alley called La Perla by coming home with bed bugs.
While in South America last year I found myself overwhelmed by my company and underwhelmed by a country. After, I promised this one would be for myself, by myself.
Are we in fear of a birthday of purposeful solitude? Will you move along with a new age, a new decade?
To turn a new age with the new year feels like attunement.
On my twenty-seventh, the year of covid, alignment to life in so far as prescience for what lies ahead began its course.
The year of my Saturn return in tandem with when the world stood still.
Momentous progression around the bend as I laid in bed in my Bed-Stuy apartment awaiting the shift. An inexplicable forebodence to this day. Familia woes, untapped personal trauma and worldly upheaval felt but a lunge, grasp, swing away.
Twenty-eight was a fluke. A down day on set. The crew ventures away. By the sea at an off the road hotel in Greenport, Long Island— I am alone.
January in a seaside town is meditative. A ghost town without the darkness of once was.
Desk girl hands me a card for the local car service— there are no Ubers where they come from. I ring— no answer. “It’s about a forty minute walk into town,” she tells me.
Sure of those who drive by wonder why the seemingly normal looking woman walks alone in the dead of winter on the side of a highway. Buy a pack of birthday cigs at the local corner store. Grab a cortado to sit on a dock bench amongst the winter seagulls.
A calm like such on my birthday never came before.
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