Chapter Thirty-Five: Growing Old and Growing Up (~jinghan)

Note from the Author: Sorry for writing everything out of order. Such is life.

July 18th 2011

It’s 11 am approximately 20 years after the day I was born and I am still in bed. For the past few years (the teenaged years) birthdays have come and gone with excitement or disappointment or most commonly both, but this year I’m just lying in bed with a serenity that I’ve forgotten that birthdays can have.

I’m suspecting something devious from my boyfriend because I was deviously evil with his birthday surprise and when one is deviously evil one should always be wary of revenge attacks. My phone buzzes to tell me I have a new text and I pick it up not knowing what to expect.

It’s actually a text from an old high school friend. “Happy birthday! We should totally meet up for lunch some time.” To you this may seem like merely a standard birthday text, but for me it put a warm glow in my heart.

Back when I was a young and selfish fifteen going on sixteen, I decided that I would not announce to everyone that it was my birthday because it seemed so monstrously arrogant and besides people would remember it was my birthday without me nagging them about it… right?

Ironically, it turned out to be an arrogant act, and it seemed that not as many people cared about my birthday as I thought. But what crushed me the most was the friend I thought cared about me the most had remembered my birthday wrong and I spent the rest of the day being completely miserable and hateful of birthdays. It was only later (or perhaps now) that I realise that just because someone forgets your birthday doesn’t mean they don’t care about you. And this particular friend was just the sort that was forgetful and didn’t take birthdays to heart.

I was touched that she happened to remember my birthday this year, especially since I hadn’t expected to hear from her.

I manage to roll out of bed by 12pm to let my boyfriend into the house. “Have you had anything to eat?” he asks me cautiously.

“No. I’m starving.”

“Well…” he says cautiously again, “I was thinking I could take you out to lunch… or breakfast… I mean brunch at the cafe down the street you were telling me about. Only if you want to of course…”

“That would be really nice!”

Aw how nice, my boyfriend was taking me out to lunch on my birthday. So that’s what he had been planning all along. We have strawberries and raspberries on pancake with ice cream. And he wants to go look around Maling Street shopping street, and I remember that I need to get some sour peach hearts from the lolly shop because a friend of mine hadn’t tried them (!!) . And we go to the park and he keeps pausing to send things on his phone, which is a little bit rude… and suspicious, so I don’t say anything. He did say he had invited a few more people to a casual dinner I had semi-organised and left in his care.

I want to go home and rest and be warm before going out to dinner so we head home. I get myself a glass of water. He uses the bathroom. I bounce up the stairs to my room and open the door and see a lot of balloons…

Wait. What?

I do a double take: there are balloons EVERYWHERE, on my desk, on my bed, on the floor up to the level of my bed and there are some balloons strung across the ceiling saying “HAPPY BIRTHDAY”.

What? How?

I hear some giggling coming from the balloons.

Wait. What? Balloons don’t giggle do they?

“I can hear you…” I say accusingly. (But a little bit hesitantly incase it was just the balloons giggling to themselves.)

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY” and all these people I wasn’t expecting to see jump out from what I thought had been merely a pile of inanimate balloons.

We laugh and take pictures and then go out to dinner with other friends. It’s only later in the quiet wake of all the birthday frivolities while trying to find my pyjamas while shuffling knee-high through balloons that I have time to take in and admire the amount of effort put in to blowing up all the balloons (480 of them to be exact). I certainly did not expect anything like this…

But perhaps the not-expecting is the key to enjoying one’s birthday. All those selfish teenaged years where I’ve hoped dearly that someone would do something cool (like fill my room with balloons) for me on my birthday, and wrestled in vain with expectations and disappointment… This year, instead, I had discovered how much fun it was to plan something cool for someone else’s birthday. In the end by simply looking forward to the simple joys of a day I had had the best birthday ever… even if my boyfriend had just taken me out for pancakes.

Watch out world. Jinghan the no-longer-teenager is here. She’s all grown up… but certainly not grown old. Now excuse me while I go play with balloons.