Every year it rains on my birthday. When I turned eighteen the water rose to kiss my doorstep, and when I churned across the backyard I left craters of mud in my wake. I couldn’t save the clothesline, bowed under the weight of wet sheets and sinking in the softening dirt. The year before that, the rain was a fine mist that beaded the folds of my fishbone plait. I remember my mother told me how stupid I looked even as she braided it at my insistence.
It didn’t rain this year. I wonder where these birthday memories went. Certainly nothing happened when I turned twenty and reluctantly said farewell to adolescence, except when a Sudanese man slowly toppled off his bar stool. A bar. I was in a bar. That’s the point I’ve reached: staring into my watery cranberry vodka, playing bingo at the university bar (alone) while the Max Dirtbike Tournament flickers above my head on the projector, larger than life.
