Birthday Wishes

Be careful what you wish for. It’s one of those phrases that people like to say to you when they’ve asked you what you desire and you’ve made the stupid mistake of telling them. They also usually add “it won’t come true now you’ve said it.”

This was a conversation I had many times. At each birthday I would pull my hair away from my face and blow out the candles. The year I had a caterpillar cake and four candles, I wished for a puppy. That one didn’t come true. The year I had ten pink candles on a ghastly princess cake, I wished for a pony. That one didn’t come true either.

There was neither candles nor cake for my eleventh birthday. Just a fiver in a card that read ‘love Dad xx’.  My birthday cards perched alongside those that read ‘condolences’ and ‘in deepest sympathy’. That was the first year I wished for something impossible. I wished for my mother back. 

Over the years this was the theme for my birthday wishes. I mean it changed, sometimes I added ‘I wish no-one had to die’, or   the morbid ‘may I die before my children, but not before I’m old’. Sometimes I threw in ‘and peace on earth’.  And then there was that year when I was seventeen and hated the world. My wish that year wasn’t for peace on earth or immortality, but a desire for everything to end, a raging apocalypse to mirror my own emotions. But aside from that year...

I never spoke these wishes aloud.  So they had a shot at coming true.

And they did.

The world is calmer now. There’s no war anymore. Not after that last one. It lasted a couple of years but we won eventually. There’s no fighting, neighbour rarely raises a hand against neighbour. We spend our days peacefully roaming the earth; my children and my parents beside me. They will never die, they are already dead.

Be careful what you wish for.