I want to die on my birthday, not because I hate living, but because I am tired of the arithmetic of it, the way years stack like unpaid bills, the way candles turn into tiny interrogations asking what I did with the light. On that day the calendar claps, people text confetti, and I feel like a guest of honor at my own inquest, smiling while the room waits for a speech I never practiced. Birthdays pretend to be doors; mostly they are mirrors, and I am sick of learning my face by surprise.

I want to die on my birthday the way a song wants to end on its own chord, not dragged into an encore by polite applause. I imagine the cake sweating sugar, the knife clean and ceremonial, the wishes folding themselves into paper boats that refuse to float. I imagine the room forgiving me for leaving early, the clock loosening its grip, the candles admitting they were tired too. This is not a plan, it is a metaphor I keep touching like a bruise to see if it still hurts.

Every year arrives with a receipt. It itemizes mistakes, discounts the miracles, charges interest on love. I have learned how to carry gifts with one arm and grief with the other, how to say thank you while inventorying exits. The party hats fit like borrowed confidence. Laughter behaves, obedient as a trained animal. Inside me, something feral circles the truth, asking whether survival is a habit or a choice.

If I could choose the ending, I would choose a quiet that knows my name. I would choose to lay down the weight of being seen, the exhausting labor of translation between who I am and who I perform. I would choose to stop proving endurance is a virtue. The body keeps score, they say; mine keeps ledgers, tallies nights slept in pieces, mornings stitched together with coffee and resolve.

Still, birthdays are stubborn. They keep showing up with balloons like minor gods, insisting on witness. Friends insist too, their hands warm, their eyes unsolved. Love is an interruption I never schedule but always answer. It knocks with groceries and bad jokes and the audacity to believe tomorrow is not a trap. Sometimes I let it in. Sometimes it stays.

So if I say I want to die on my birthday, hear the grammar beneath it. I want an ending that listens. I want the counting to stop hurting. I want to blow out the candles and not be afraid of the dark that follows. I want to live long enough to learn another language for staying, one where the date on the cake is not a verdict but a comma, and the sentence keeps breathing. Maybe the wish is simpler: to be held without a stopwatch, to be celebrated without being measured, to be allowed a softness that does not require proof. Maybe the wish is to keep arriving, quietly, without fireworks, learning how to stand in the year like weather, changing, survivable. If there is a gift, let it be this: another breath that does not owe anyone an explanation, wrapped, opened, kept.

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