Spoiled rotten.My birthday wish, made forty-eight minutes late, is to meet some people in the next 365 days who are so wonderful, and from such utterly different stripes of life, that I am helpless to do anything but love their magnificence and eat up their enthusiasms, whether they be for spelunking or coding or phosphorescent fish or chandeliers or movies made by obscure French directors in the 1930s.
If some of them are, perhaps, suitable for kissing, that might be nice too.
I also wish, of course, for long conversations over tea with the friends I have, for family dinners and lazy afternoons, for great stories, for evenings in the theater and days in the studio. I want mad adventures, a dose of gumption, vast and wordless vistas of imperfect trees. I'd like to drive someplace in the summer with the windows rolled down, to visit a place unfamiliar, to dance away an entire night accompanied by a DJ worthy of angels and watch a sunrise arrive by rooftop. I'd like a minimum of finite goodbyes. Health, obviously, for me and mine. A distinct lack of newsworthy upheavals. I could do with a painting that stops my heart, just for a moment, and a song that sticks in my throat. I want to be useful. I want time to play.
I am greedy beyond belief, but it's my birthday, and that's my wish.
