Some birthdays make the whole world shine with their presence. Others blur it. Most do something in between, which is their own special kind of disaster.
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Here are all twelve of them, from those who light up the cloudless midday sky to those who remove the moon at midnight.
1. May
Enjoying your radiantly uplifting vibe is like gazing at the Sun while standing on the planet Mercury. He finds the good in each person and in every situation. Even the most cruel, escapist misanthrope feels tension melt away from his body the moment you smile at him. What’s even more confusing and frustrating for the dark-spirited among us is that, at least the time they spend in your presence, you somehow find a way to convince them that they’re just as chipper and sprightly and happy as you. If you find out that you have a terminal disease, your undeniable good vibration will destroy the disease until it retreats, retreats, and decides to afflict someone like it.
2. June
People gravitate to you the way flowers gravitate toward the light – automatically, spontaneously, and without realizing they’re doing it until they realize they’ve been depending on you for twenty minutes. He remembers things about people they have forgotten: the name of their childhood dog, something they once said about their mother, a dream they abandoned years ago and never told anyone about. You attract the best people like the moon pulling a scarf out of a hat, except the scarf was always there and only you saw it. Hardy critics who have spent decades carefully tending their grief find, after an afternoon with you, that it has withered inexplicably, and they have to go home and start the whole damn project over again from seed.
3. April
You create hope that people greet your arrival like birds chirping in the morning. Not because you said anything – you didn’t have to – but because watching you live in that kind of incandescent, slightly reckless joy makes other people well aware of how modest and shy they’ve been. You once talked to a stranger who was afraid to do something he had been avoiding for years, he stood beaming as he did it, and when he turned to thank you, you were gone, the light trailing behind you like the tail of a comet.
4. September
Strong, golden, and as reliable as the sun at three o’clock in the afternoon, it is the birth month that people call when everything has gone sideways and they need someone who won’t panic, who won’t imitate, and who won’t do it themselves. You don’t burn. You are not blind. You just show up, as strong and as bright as the situation calls for, and that’s more convincing than all the pyrotechnics in the world. The mistake – and there is one – is that you are so sure you are right about everything that you will correct a stranger’s grammar at his wedding and sleep like a baby that night, undisturbed by even the tiniest whisper of regret.
5. March
He’s the first burst of real warmth after a long, grinding winter – when everyone stumbles outside blinking and remembering, with physical relief, that the Sun is still there and still working. People bloom before you. They make plans. They started things. But it’s still March, which means that without any warning you can drop thirty degrees, open up the sky, and bury everything in six inches of snow, and then it’s gloriously sunny and the next morning it’s like nothing happened.
6. November
A mixed blessing. He’s a birthday candle – lit with such intense intensity that moths fly off the back porch and are unapologetic. You illuminate everything around you whether it asks to be illuminated or not. What no one says, something that is easily understood and left unsaid, is that you also, by definition, burn down, and from the moment someone strikes a match, and the wax melts, and the wick becomes shorter, and you continue to burn wonderfully, do not worry at all, until someone brings you out without smoke, a little ribon and not a little smell. a small round spot on the frosting.
7. July
Drunk with your happiness, you are a fireworks display that will never go out quietly. You burn at a temperature that other birth months find you yearning from a safe distance, but unbearable up close. Exaggerating your resting state. He’s the moon who convinced himself that the team would last forever, and for a while – a glorious, deafening, sweaty season – it seemed possible. But once everyone is dead or in jail, all that’s left is the smell of low sulfur, trash on the front lawn, and a vicious hangover.
8. August
You are an amazing summer that has been going on for a very long time. Because the grass is dead, the car thermometer reads 108, and three people go inside to sleep with cold cloths on their foreheads. He gives great light. Big, endless, take-it-or-leave-it shine. And just when everyone has made peace with the heat and blink and adjusted all their lives accordingly, he investigates Section 4 out of place and rearranges his neighborhood.
9. December
Decked out in lights from head to toe and exuding joy, cozy like someone who knows full well how dark it is outside and has decided to deal with it by covering every available space with flashing lights and demanding that everyone do something about it, he’s the living embodiment of trying hard. The effort is real. The bond is complete. And yet no amount of eggnog or caroling or neatly wrapped packages can hide the fact that the Sun has been setting earlier and earlier for weeks.
10. February
Love is something that many have luxury, and you are living proof of this, which means that you have taken the luxury of many and run with it completely. You are a Valentine card that somehow caught fire – all hearts and roses and a beautiful, intoxicating feeling until the glitter caught fire and suddenly everyone around singed their eyebrows and they don’t know how this happened so quickly. He likes the brutality that blinds people, briefly and completely, the way a lightbulb blinds people, and they walk around seeing places for weeks, and some of them never fully see again.
11. January
The decorations are down, the gifts are returned, the credit card debt is due, and you’re the only one left — the empty, gray, unadorned expanse of the calendar that makes people stare out the window and question their basic life choices. You are not cruel about it. You are not cruel. You’re just there, wide and unblinking and devoid of all the tinsel and the flashing lights and the conventional myth that all is well, and honestly you’re probably the most articulate moon of all, which is a kind way of saying that spending time with you is like someone slowly removing a bandage in a cold room with no music.
12. October
The sun goes down early, the shadows stretch longer, and everything that used to be in the light looks horrible in the dark, which is perfect because you’ve always loved being sick more than lifting. He is the moon who puts a candle inside the open skull and calls it decoration. He is the moon who made death a party and charged admission. Bats, black cats, things that decay well – these are your people, your beauty, your natural habitat, and you go around the world accordingly, casting a spectral spectrum that other birth months find cool and difficult to explain to their children.