The Birthday That Never Was
The dress was going to be yellow—
sunflower yellow, the kind that hurts to look at
in full light, which we hadn’t had in months anyway,
just the gray sift of dust through shattered windows
and the orange pulse when the sky opened its mouth.
She would have been eight.
Eight candles we couldn’t buy, couldn’t light
even if we had them. The power died in March
and took with it the oven, the mixer, the bright hum
of anything working the way it should.
I had saved the flour. Hidden it
like contraband, like hope—
three cups in a plastic bag
behind the loose tile in the kitchen
that no longer had a kitchen attached.
The cake would have been chocolate.
She asked for chocolate every year,
and every year I made vanilla because it was cheaper,
promising next time, habibi, next time—
and she believed me because she was seven, then six, then five,
and children believe their mothers
until the moment they learn not to.
The game was going to be musical chairs.
Ridiculous. As if we had music. As if we had chairs.
As if eight children could gather in one place
without someone calculating the efficiency
of the target, the value of the payload,
the acceptable margin of small bones.
I found one candle yesterday.
White. Thin. Half-melted from the heat.
I don’t know why I picked it up,
why I put it in my pocket like a relic,
like something that still meant birthday
and not just another way to mark
what didn’t happen.
She would have blown it out.
Made a wish. The wish would have been
something possible in her world—
a new doll, a book, a day at the beach
before she learned that the beach was closed,
that the sea doesn’t want us anymore,
that wanting itself is a luxury
distributed unevenly.
I lit the candle last night.
Just to see. Just to remember what it meant
to have a small flame and a reason for it.
It burned for twenty minutes before the wind
took it, and I sat in the dark
singing happy birthday to the space
where eight years old should have been,
where the yellow dress should have twirled,
where chocolate should have smudged her smile,
where she should have cheated at musical chairs
and laughed when I pretended not to notice—
but the dark doesn’t answer,
and the candle is out,
and eight is just a number now,
a countable thing,
a cake that was never baked,
a girl who will never be nine.
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