Dear birthday person,
It is now that time of the year when believers reminisce your birth. I am also a witness to the festive mood. To be sure, I can't admire the aesthetics of embellished Christmas trees, opulent infrastructures and made up faces. But, the smell of sweet ginger, cookies, fresh woollens and hats, the sound of heels, carols and laughter and the recurrent verbal greetings ultimately succeed in curling up the edges of my lips.
I have also always loved your emphasis on love! It was the practice of this injunction that won me many Santas. The beginning of college was appearing to be a trying time given academic inaccessibility just when, as if in a mundane moment of everyday life, several 'lovingly believing' classmates, each at different intervals, volunteered to read and record hard-copies for me. Reverend Joseph, our principal, always smiled at my friends but would always translate that smile into a verbal or tactile greeting for me to be able to acknowledge. Given the debated scriptural injunction against queerness, my favourite person - also a firm believer - was the last to be told about my sexuality. But I was told that my judgement was unfair.
Many thanks to you! But there has been a gap that this love could not fulfill. Here, I am talking about another manifestation of love all together. In howsoever minimal an experience, this manifestation of love, to me, has been dangerous. Either I fell too deep making myself irretrievable or it was that the other person would weigh my appearance against my disability and finding the former heavier, would be passionate for the bargain. Love seems to be harmful and self-destructive.
But the longing has remained constant. Every third night, right before going to bed, an old gnaw awakens. Maybe there is another version of this manifestation of love that I am yet to experience. It is with this anticipation that I hope to embrace the approaching year. But even till then, I am happy loving myself, my neighbour's and my pet plant Jeremy!
Happy birthday!
Yours truly
Elijah
Author Bio : ''I am a reader, writer and speaker with overwhelming passion for fiction, queerness and intersectional feminism. I am a history aficionado and believe that literary interaction is the source of social revolution. I believe in the subjectivity of human identities.
Had the infrastructure around me not made me disabled, I would have wanted to drive my lovely self to a peaceful Mediterranean restaurant to enjoy the New Year's eve.''
