the last birthday card

I won't be calling you on your birthday this year; its on a Sunday.

This time last year I was making you a ten-page birthday card, documenting your climb from broken-heart darkness all the way up to the throne on which you now reside.

I wrote and drew that story for two reasons:

* To keep myself from feeling sad or hurt

* To take myself out of your fairy tale

In 2007 you ignored me while we spoke on the phone. And as soon as someone who mattered to you approached you while we were speaking on the phone, you would hang up without saying goodbye.

On the last weekend of May, when I called you to see how your eye was, you told me that I was interrupting you and that my call to you was unnecessary. At the exact same moment you removed me from your life you also declared to your Real Friends that you did not need me to call you anymore.

Only months before you were sending me messages asking me to call you. But by Memorial Day weekend of 2007, you were telling your Real Friends that you have been telling me to leave you alone.

That summer the vague or cryptic response to the most innocuous questions was telling me everything I didn't want to know while sharing none of your joy or friendship. Soon our "conversations" amounted to little more than you calling me to tell me you had no time to call me.

Still I chose to end that desparate, year-long summer by writing a story to celebrate your new and improved life. I made the card in the same spirit as when I used to complement or support your efforts or listened to what you had to say. The only way I knew how to make myself feel better was to do something nice for you.

But in the story I wrote I was finishing what you started all year. I was taking myself out of your story.

In that birthday card of 2007 you help yourself out of the doubt in which you were immersed. The beautiful half of you helps the other half of you become just as beautiful. And now you both live your royal life with those who are just as beautiful as you find yourself now.

No magic beans. No sword in the stone. No spinning wheel turning the straw you once buried yourself under into the gold plated majesty which you sit upon now.

In your story there is no ugly frog who just got uglier each time you kissed it. There is no ugly troll who guarded the bridge between the last two Real Loves of your Life. In your story no one spared you from the cold river of loneliness that runs under the bridge between your last marriage and the next.

All your Real Friends know that story was written by the creep that bothered you Memorial Day weekend.

Now that you know How to Love and How to Be Loved, you don't need to speak to those who don't. Now that your Heart is in the Right Place, you don't even feel the slightest need to tell me how it got there.

I was only just for pretend. I was only Make Believe.

And from now on you will always and forever live happily ever after.