Twenty Candles and One Ruined Sleeve

The punch got me within ten minutes. Not a big spill, just enough, the kind where you dab at it with a paper napkin and then spend the rest of the night with your arm angled slightly away from people so they don't notice. I noticed the whole time. That's how tonight started.

Sophie's birthday. Her roommate had moved every piece of furniture at least six inches to make room, strung lights along the wall that were definitely left over from Christmas, and shoved a folding table into the corner under the window with a sheet cake on it that was already a little lopsided before anyone touched it. Twenty candles. The wish took a genuinely embarrassing amount of time. We were all standing there holding our breath and someone in the back said 'oh my god' very quietly and Sophie shot them a look and then blew them all out in one go like she'd been saving it up.

I ended up on cake duty, which I always somehow end up on, something about the way I hover near the table apparently reads as volunteering. The frosting was the kind that sticks to everything. I got three plates out before the spatula gave up on me.

cake distribution is a serious responsibility

By the time we were all settled, some people on chairs, some on the floor, someone definitely sitting on a laundry basket they'd dragged out from the closet, it was the kind of evening that doesn't have an agenda. Just people in a room, getting warm from being close together, saying things that weren't important but somehow felt like they were.

I've been doing my solo runs so early lately that most of my days feel a little quiet. This was the opposite of quiet. By the end I was sitting on the arm of someone's chair, holding a cup of punch I was not drinking anywhere near my sleeve, and thinking that this is also something worth showing up for, not the ritual I built for myself, but the one other people build and let you into. Sophie turns twenty and suddenly her cramped living room is the exact right size.

somewhere between the cake and the end of the night

I walked home with frosting on my thumb and didn't wipe it off until I got to my door.