birthday interlude
Hello friend, thanks for opening! Got a bit busy this weekend because of C's birthday celeb, so this letter is coming to you after all that. Hope your weekend was great and refreshing! Just sharing with you a few things here and there, hopefully some of it will be useful to you. -K
C marked her birthday over the weekend, her second under lockdown, so our celebration was, like last year's, muted and intimate. We ordered food, a bit of cake, and watched the eight-hour BTS Bangbangcon, the MPL Season 7 matches, and some episodes of Hotel del Luna on Netflix--all of which we highly recommend!
So far, we've had three birthdays between us, all of which we've spent with each other and away from family and friends--in true pandemic fashion. With Metro Manila and surrounding areas back in some form of stricter community quarantine measures owing to 10k++ daily new cases over the past week or so, it's still too risky, even for small gatherings.
They say age is just a number; I think this is truer than ever in this lockdown. Time moves differently when you're stuck in one place far too long--some days, it feels like an injustice, that time goes by even when we can't go anywhere; other days, it feels like mercy. Most times, I feel like we all deserve to be stuck at the ages we all turned the last time we had a real birthday, which was probably in 2019, before all of this.
I've always liked saying age is just a number; I can't remember how old I was when I realized that our parents were fourteen years apart--a fact I noticed only because I learned to read documents, thereby discovering the years they were born, and not because it was something that was obvious in our household. Because it was never. My parents ran our household as equals. If anything, our mother though younger was the more domineering one, and was often the one who got the final word.
We never talk about it often enough, and at this point, I just assume everybody already knows how wide the age gap is between C and I--often the subject of fond ribbing of the How old were you when this came out? kind, but never really an actual issue. I like to say, she keeps me young and grounded. She widens my worldview. I have seen a few peers who are already way too tired or too jaded or too busy to deal with people outside our circles, those who cannot be considered peers because they're younger or inexperienced. I would have been among them had it not been for C.
But I am not, and every day, I am learning and I am thankful for the opportunity to see the world through her eyes. I don't think I've spent as much time with anyone as I have with her during this lockdown--try a solid 525,600 minutes, to the truest sense of the count, and perhaps even more, considering how we're now past the lockdown anniversary.
In any case, as she marks her birthday this year, we're now back to being only a decade apart, until I mark mine at the end of the year hehe.
All else considered, don't you think it's fascinating? How at the end of it, of all strings that could have tangled, it turned out to be hers and mine, after all this time?
Recs from around the internet
- Tag yourself, I'm Academy Award-winning Glance Choreography lmao: SNL's Lesbian Period Drama skit is accurate and painfully so
- I bookmarked this as an AU: I fell in love with my best friend during this pandemic via Autostraddle
- The collab you never knew you needed
- C still won't let me call my thirst trap dishwashing livestream "OnlyPan"
- "When you are forty-three in New York City, raising children, you have already lost the New York that mattered to you at age twenty-three." via LitHub.
- My favorite part of Bangbangcon21 is this dance break in their MIC DROP performance in Brazil. Rent-free in my head, tears in my eyes, etc.
- This is heartbreaking.
Requisite commercial
- ADD TO CART: C's Astroneko Deskmat series group buy is still ongoing! Will be most grateful for your support. How to purchase? Check out full details at bit.ly/astroneko-gb or purchase directly via Zion Studios PH. Also available internationally, so tell your friends :) Thank you!
Have a good week ahead, friends! Thank you for reaching this far.
XO,
K