36, 33
In the chaotic early days of our solar system, a massive collision shattered a single primordial asteroid. But instead of scattering to the cosmic winds, two nearly equal fragments remained, caught in each other's gravitational embrace. These would become the twin asteroids of Antiope. As the debris settled and the dust cleared, they began an intricate gravitational negotiation - at first in erratic, unstable paths, until they found their perfect balance. Discovered in 1996 improved telescopes revealed that what we thought was one asteroid was actually two, nearly identical in size.
Each roughly 88 kilometers across, these cosmic twins orbit a point in empty space between them, completing their celestial waltz every 16.5 hours. They reflect each other in almost every way - their size, their composition, even the way they move through space.
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I can't remember which date it was - but it was the first or second one. The details all blur together, a sea of red hair catching the fall wind, a green sweater hanging off one shoulder that might have been cotton or might have been wool, blue skies stolen from summer, grey sidewalks still damp from the morning fog, beige plane plastic worn from smooth from a thousand other passengers before me, brown beat up luggage a reminder that I still believe in and carry the romance of travel and black arrival boards with only one destination.
I can't remember which conversation it was - they all seem to blend together in a similar way. The way it always does at the beginning of a good relationship, every topic just drifting into the next one. You're not talking about anything, you are just simply talking. Parents, elementary school, our love of food, painful experiences and faults, New York, Seattle - all the things. Laughter is punctuation. The subjects aren't the point, words are just an elaborate way of saying "I find you interesting" over and over, hoping to hear it back.
At some point someone brought up their birthday and the other person, happy and surprised, noted that their birthday was one day apart.
December 10th. December 11th.
Thus a shared birthday was born. First in Encinitas, California. We walked as far on the beach as we possibly could. The cold shock of the water when I waded out to impress you, the way you surprised me by diving past me straight into a wave. I can still see the perfect arc of the dive and you emerging all smiles. We sat on big beach towels for hours, shoulder to shoulder, just reading.
Next in Seattle, Washington just after Shelby moved. In a seventeen thousand square foot trampoline park which used to be a Costco. The trampolines are commercial-grade units manufactured in Stuttgart, Germany, each capable of launching an adult human approximately four to six feet into the air - or in our case, generating sufficient force to produce grade two whiplash in two overconfident and aging adults. All worth it for brief moments of suspension, weightlessness and pretending we were kids again. Gael, eight at the time, selected the venue in a calculated act of pizza and attack on our spines.
The birthday tradition continues to evolve as does our shared language. "My birthday" has become "our birthday". The singular is dropped for the plural. We plan now not just around a preteen, but also a newborn - each with their own requisite needs and desires. This year Gaël had trouble ceding the day because school has been hard. But this is no problem, our birthdays are an authentically intimate merger of personal milestones that works because it is defined by generosity: giving and receiving. This extends wherever it is needed.
I keep thinking about all the ways time shapes relationships, how we measure dates and anniversaries. There is nothing inherently special about any arbitrary unit of time, whether it be 24 hours or 365 days. The measurement of time, like a measurement of any natural phenomenon is an attempt to impose order on chaos. The orbit of the Earth around the sun is 365.256363004 days. We round it to 365, add a leap year, and build our lives around these approximations. But the significance of them has come to me in the opportunity to look back exactly one year or forward at the same time. A chance to pause and look at what was and what we hope will be.
This last year has been hard on me in ways I never expected and hope I won't encounter again in the future. Being unemployed and having a pregnancy to deal with - a uniquely American horror story - led me to a job which ended up hurting my mental health and relationships. This hurt, but was offset by welcoming Thomas to our family. It’s been wonderful rediscovering myself as a new father “again”.
So looking forward I don't have any lofty goals or transformative resolutions. Just grateful that I made it here and that I'm healthy now. I'm lucky to have a shared birthday with someone who is a mystery to me. A partner who I can discover every day.
I think about those twin asteroids, endlessly in one long dance. Neither one leading or following. Time must move differently out there in the vast dark. Perhaps whats needed is not goals or resolutions, but to celebrate this simple orbit of two bodies finding their balance, falling together through space,
Cowabunga Dude,
DJ
PS: I read this poem a few years ago sitting in a taco shop and it always feels significant on a birthday: https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/poetry-180/all-poems/item/poetry-180-102/when-death-comes/ (if you read nothing else, read the last line)