14
creative writing
Birthdays
By bella hatch
Darkness, warmth, then glittering cold and harsh lights. The sounds of a world unmuffled by water and flesh. A sharp hand descends on your buttock and you choke on fluid and air and the first piercing scream of your tiny life. Gently cradling hands and harsh latex gloves deliver you into the world, out of your mother’s womb and into her arms.
Sweet sixteen: young and inexperienced and mature and growing up oh-so fast. A padded bra beneath your birthday badge, a brace-y smile that you haven’t yet been taught to resent, thick foundation over skin you constantly see problems in. Mum’s lipstick and perfume, playing at being grown while blindly navigating that awkward stage between innocence and worldly A single, tiny candle atop a single tiny cupcake, wisdom. You stand on the precipice of maturity, brought into your close field of vision and then but don’t yet know how to handle it. quickly retracted when your curious fingers stray too close to the flame. Birthday cake smeared, sacYour parents smile as you sip from flutes of charine and soft, across your lips. Fistfuls of icing bubbles, much more expensive than anything clutched in your exploring hands. Peals of laughter you’ve tasted before. The whole bottle is yours that feel new in your tiny chest, babbling nonsense now - in fact so is the world; a sparkling expanse words interspersed with the occasional utterance of unexplored experiences. Adulthood stretchthat sends parents racing for the camera, quick, es before you, glowing with opportunity, heavy quick, what was that, was that her first word, dar- with expectations and excitements. You stand on ling, say that again! the edge of a world you can’t even begin to fathom. How poorly these eighteen years have been At five, you think maybe you’re starting to get at preparing you for the biggest world you will the hang of this. Those memories of a hospital bed ever experience. The bubbles fizz in your throat and mother’s milk have faded in your ever-grow- and you laugh, drunk on the giddy headrush of ing brain, but the promise of safety still rests solid- it all. ly in the arms of the woman who birthed you, the man who holds you in the night when the monsters come. Whirls of colour and music, a rapidly cycling entourage of children brandishing gifts wrapped in loud, coloured paper and glittering bows. Your greedy fingers itch to touch the balloons, to take them outside and allow yourself to float away into whatever future you find yourself drawn to. Your first cake containing double digits settles in your stomach alongside a growing pit of wonder. You get the first taste of adulthood on your tongue when your aunt offers you a sip of wine from the table. You order your own food and cut it up with your own fork and big knife. You’re wearing the velvet top your cousin gave you, V-necked and pinched in around the waist you don’t have yet.
Photo: Unsplash
