december 21st

Disclaimer: This piece is an introduction for a much longer project that I am working on. My boyfriend and I are going through something extremely difficult and heartbreaking. My only catharsis is to write about it, as writers do. The next few posts I make are going to be documenting my experiences in life and in love with him mostly. There will eventually be things that might be graphic, and I will make sure to do my best to add trigger warnings when necessary. I ask everyone who reads this, and the pieces to come, to please keep us in your prayers as we navigate the coming months. Be safe, everyone.


december 21st

My boyfriend and I share a birthday. Whenever I tell people this, usually the first thing out of their mouth is something like “that’s fuckin weird”. It’s like people can’t imagine sharing their own special day with someone else. I wonder who’s going to tell them that there’s 7 billion people on earth, and one of them is bound to share their birthday.


The truth is it never really bothered me. We figured it out 5 years ago, right after we first met. It was the beginning of January, and we were driving in the truck I had at the time, a big, broken, ugly, Chevy Trailblazer. My 19th birthday had just passed, and I was telling him all about the party I had, and how much of a pain it was to get everyone together so close to the Christmas season. It was the middle of the night and we were driving around his bumbfuck neighborhood in deep Queens. We were only about half an hour away from Manhattan, but the only light we had was from the conveyor belt of streetlights that lined the backroads of his town.


I hoped he wouldn’t notice the pathetic grey threads of fabric that desperately tried to cover the backseat of my truck as we climbed over the small mountains of soda bottles and cigarette boxes to the back. I’ll never forgive myself for not cleaning that piece of shit before picking him up that night. He clearly didn’t care, but it made what we were doing feel so much more skeevy then it was. We sat in the backseat, lit a joint and compared playlists. I told him his favorite band, Green Day, sold out in the 90s, and he told me that my music was for “sad boys” and called me a pussy.


The Misfits started playing and we argued over whether or not the band would ever get back together.(Spoiler alert: they did in 2019, 4 years after this conversation. We dropped acid and went to the show together. The night ended in a huge fight and breaking glass, but it was a killer time.) We were already cursing each other out for shitty music taste, and I let him smoke my weed. If that’s not love, then I really, truly, don’t know what love is.


We had sex in the backseat of my truck that night. I remember praying to God that he wouldn't notice that I absolutely did not shave my legs, or how dry my skin was because of the bitchy New York winter. It didn't really matter anyway, its not like we had the space in the backseat of my car to actually examine each other's bodies. All I noticed were the beautiful tattoos that covered his right arm. In the dark all I saw was muted flowers and birds, I came to later find out that the arm sleeve was a tribute to his mother.

I guess I was sort of an “easy” kind of girl back then. Hell, I’d probably still be an easy kind of girl now if we weren't together. Sex really doesn’t mean much to me, we’re all just animals after all. I will say though, that even if it did, I still would have let him fuck me in my truck that night. I think I knew that I loved him before I really knew him, either that or I'm as batshit crazy as everyone says I am.


Over the next few years whether we were talking or not, whenever our birthday came around, I thought of him. For the last 3 years, we’ve spent our birthday together. To us It’s the unofficial start of the holiday season. Its one day we can have to ourselves, and celebrate each other, and the year that we had just spent together. Through good, or bad, it’s our day, and that doesn’t bother me one bit. {/linespace:1.2}