Happy birthday, Anika
Happy Birthday, Anika
Three things: something that types itself out, the photographs, and a letter. It will take you about four minutes, which is roughly one Sunday phone call.
Anika · 31 today
Read this bit slowly
Born on
Sunday phone calls, roughly
Thirty-one years, and I was there for all but two of them.
Where you actually are
You learnt to drive at twenty-nine and told nobody until you passed.
Fourteen lessons, two failed tests, and a gatepost you reversed into twice in the same week — and I found out about none of it until the day you passed, when you rang me from the car park sounding about nine years old.
That is the bit I want to say something about. You do the hard thing quietly and then announce the result as if it were nothing. The flat move was the same. The job was the same. Even the airport birthday, which you turned into a joke before anybody could feel sorry for you.
You do not have to arrive with it already finished. I would like to be there for the fourteen lessons as well.
The photographs
Most of these you have never seen. Some you will want deleted.
One vending machine flapjack,
photographed at gate B41,
captioned “feast”.
That is the whole of you.
The actual letter
You ring me every Sunday on the way to the shop and hang up at the till, and I have somehow come to organise my whole week around eleven minutes of you complaining about a bus.
I do not think you know what those calls do. There have been Sundays where I had nothing good to report and you talked for the entire walk without once asking me to explain myself. You have never made me perform being fine.
We shared a room for seventeen years and I spent most of them wanting the space. I have had the space for fourteen years now, and it turns out I would put the sellotape back tomorrow.
Happy birthday. Ring me on Sunday. Complain about a bus.
— your sister, always
Happy birthday, Anika.
Send me a photo of somebody else’s dog. It is tradition now.
made for you