Written by Gretchen FIlart
Content Warning: Childhood trauma
Thirty-nine years. No longer out for blood—my own, always. No shards hiding in my bag for
immediate relief. No beer bottles behind my bedroom door pretending to be medicine. This is thirty-
nine years after birthdays meant scooping floodwater back into the turbid ocean outside my mother’s
old house, as grimy sala tiles shapeshifted to a pool with floating dead roaches and dog shit. When a
birthday was a cold November night in the emergency room, counting saline drops in her IV bottle
because she preferred treating diabetes with Ibuprofen and spooning unprescribed antibiotics into our
mouths for every fever, every ache. In her hand, an outdated medical textbook that she carried
everywhere like religion, a shield for every doctor’s order she defied. When love meant I would only
receive it if I unconditionally followed a phalanx of tall orders. When tears are not fit for parental
consumption, and if you wanna cry, do it in your room!
On every birthday I peered into windows, seeking a door to sunlight. On my plate, never-ending
monsoons.
Today, I celebrate birthdays differently. I trade flamboyant heels for hiking shoes. Birdsong and trees
instead of drowning my mother’s piercing words at eardrum-shattering parties. Silence is now
equivalent to safety and comfort, not some distance that can only be bridged by obedience or a belt
snapping against the skin.
I am aboard the long throat of a bus that transports me, my daughter Lia, and my twenty-year-old
niece Maia to a small inn in Kias, a sleepy town nestled in the Cordillera mountains five hours away
from home. My mother does not know where we are or our permanent address. Fifth year. One can
forgive but still say, “enough.”
We arrived on a cloudy, drizzling, 25-degree Friday noon to wet, coniferous roads. I left my ten-year-
old in Maia’s care to get two tattoos: an ouroboros for destruction and rebirth; and on my shoulder,
the word “malaya”—Filipino for free.
Amid a sudden onslaught of rain and umbrella-inverting winds, I bought us ebi tempura, Pad Thai,
and a fist-size chocolate cake—small and unflashy yet precious like life after a blackened chapter. I
waved endlessly for taxis on the dark streets, sopping from calves to soles. Cabs come, cabs leave. Every
arrival taken, every hope refused for an hour.
A white sedan finally halts in front. Inside, everything feels familiar to my mother eyes: tired muscles,
dripping pants, a slow 80s song playing from the radio as I urge the driver to go as fast as he can, so I
can make it in time for dinner.
My phone rings. Cough.
“Mama, there’s blood in my phlegm,” Lia said, somewhat worried.
Another croak.
My heart pounded, but the ex-nurse in me knows better than to panic during repeat sickness. “Baby,
maybe your throat’s just inflamed. I wouldn’t worry too much.”
I assured her that I was only minutes away. “Got your meds…and shrimp!” She shrieked. In a way, she
is like me: bearer of eyes that see rainbows in broken glass.
Still breathless from sprinting, I haphazardly dried my shoes on the mat outside and apologized
profusely for being tardy. “It’s okay!” the kids squealed in unison, their eyes widening at the several
paper bags in my hands.
On the bed, we eat in takeout boxes like bears while a Miyazaki film streamed through the wall-
mounted TV across us. Greasy hands, stray rice on the sheets, laughing in between coughs. Lia falls
asleep midway through the movie. I feel her forehead for fever before tautening a pink floral blanket to
her chin and sinking into the mattress. She wraps one arm around me, as the rain pitter-pattered on the
roof. I soften, basking in its warmth against the balmy air.
Snores alternated from her side of the bed to Maia’s. In a few hours, the three of us will be stepping
out into the sun, surrounded by the green lungs of the Cordilleran forests. I tilt my head back to the
stars blinking one by one in the indigo twilight. Today’s mishaps flipped like book pages in my mind’s
eye. How enlightening in its ordinariness a birthday can be. My arms no longer wear wounds as
journal entries. My belly knows sober euphoria. I now view storms as a prelude to komorebi;
celebration as a return to a sick child to offer the tender palms of love in a way that it was not offered
to me.
Birthdays are attached to meanings—a warm, light-filled home, above all. On my thirty-ninth, I
understand: This is what it feels like.
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Gretchen Filart is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and essayist from the Philippines. Her works center on motherhood, love, healing, nature, and intersectionalities and have received distinction from phoebe’s Spring Poetry Contest and Navigator’s Travel Writing Competition. Connect with her on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky @gretchenfilart, or her website, ourworldinwords.com. She is usually friendly.