birthday.

Often times, restaurants will serve diners a little something following a dish to cleanse their palettes before the next course commences. The French lean towards vodka drizzled sorbet, while the Japanese prefer razor-thin slices of ginger. I wouldn’t presume to be so gauche as to launch into part 2 of Food without a little palette cleanser, strawberry blondie style. A simple, and horribly understated birthday note.

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We’re an unlikely pair, her and I. Had we met a few years earlier than we did (midway through university) we would have most certainly hated each other. We once took a hypothetical journey into our childhoods to imagine ourselves together as kids. The girl in pink and pearls and the girl with the pink hair and studded wristbands. She said maybe we would have been on the same baseball team. I said I didn’t play sports that involved teams or balls. I probably would have just gotten hit in the face with the bat, I said. No, she said, you probably would have gotten hit in the face by me.

Fortunately, the high school meeting and probable stuffing in the locker of one party was avoided. We became friends through the horrid unoriginality of academic group projects assigned alphabetically by surname. Saying we “became friends” suggests something more linear and organic than what actually happened. One snowy midwinter afternoon she opened her door to a knock and found one of her alphabetically assigned group members-cum-acquaintances standing on her doormat, an hour early. ‘Hi’, she said. ‘I’ve fallen out of love. Should I break up with my boyfriend today?’ I replied.

Two years later the boys have changed, we’ve both fallen, (often crashing into flaming heaps of wreckage) in and out of love, we’re no longer alphabetically assigned to each other, and yet somehow I can’t remember how things were without her.

She’s miraculously always there when I need someone to pick my head out of the toilet and relocate it to a bed. When traveling together, she’ll take my suitcases down from my shelf because I can’t reach them, sneak a beret into my bag for photo ops in Paris, and stand in one of the most glamorous train stations in the world running a lint brush over my clothes and holding a mirror while I readjust the part in my hair. She puts up with my romantic drama and the seemingly chronic bouts of foot-in-mouthisms hurled at her by the various men in my life. She listens to my confessions, celebrates my triumphs, and overlooks even the most grievous of my mistakes. When I get lost or lose my wallet in a foreign country she’ll book me hotels and train tickets over the phone. She’ll travel hundreds of miles to a city she hates to visit, knowing she’ll have to sleep in a tiny bed in a (seemingly impossibly) even tinier flat with a kitchen that she has to stock herself if she wants to eat. She’s met my flights, helped me moved, and walked me home when I’m unable to stand.

Never asking anything in return, her flaws are being too patient, too forgiving, too modest, and most unforgivably, too far away. Hearing her talk about herself, I don’t think she’s met the girl I, and everyone else, want so badly to introduce her to: the stunning, charming, savvy, sweet girl with the red hair. The lively girl who’s always up for striking a pose in a graffiti-filled alley or atop an oversized stone daschund. The girl who’s always there to wipe away your tears and make you laugh at the ridiculousness of your problems. The girl who cares more about people she’s just met than herself. The girl who falls in love hard and suffers enormously as a result. The girl whose sharp tongue and cunning witticisms deserve a much larger audience. The girl with chiseled cheekbones, porcelain skin and arched eyebrows enough to make any self-respecting film noire heroine slink abashedly into the smoky shadows.

The girl who deserves a birthday better than anyone can give her.

Here’s looking at you, kid.