The Birthday Lesson

The quarterly reports had gone soft on me. That sounds crazy, I know, but it's true. I'd been staring at the third quarter projections so long that the numbers started swimming around the page like tadpoles. And somewhere around page eleven I realized I was reading the same paragraph for the fourth time and absorbing exactly none of it.

I'm Alissa, by the way. Twenty-nine, for about two and a half more hours. Senior accountant at a firm so small we don't even have a receptionist, which is how I ended up alone in the office at 9:40 on a Tuesday night, the week before a deadline, doing voluntary overtime that nobody asked for.

Why? Well. Because tomorrow I turn thirty, and it seemed like a better idea to bury myself in depreciation schedules than to sit in my apartment across the hall from my neighbor and think about it.

My neighbor. I'll get to him.

Here's the background you need, and I'll keep it short. My last relationship, if you can call it that, lasted three months when I was twenty-seven. Coworker at my old firm. Nice enough guy, technically capable, and it was fine. Fine! It was fine the way gas station coffee is fine. And it ended, not dramatically, when he asked me what I actually wanted in bed and I froze. Full deer in headlights. Because I genuinely didn't know. Twenty-seven years old, college educated, could reconcile a general ledger blindfolded, and I could not answer a basic question about my own body.

He was kind about it. That almost made it worse. He said, "No worries, we'll figure it out," and then we didn't, and then we just kind of stopped, the way things do when nobody pushes.

So tomorrow I turn thirty, and everyone's been asking what I'm doing for the big day, and the honest answer is nothing, because thirty felt less like a birthday and more like a verdict. Thirty and still guessing. Thirty and still apologizing my way through everything, including, apparently, my own birthday.

The clock on the wall said 9:43 when the buzzer went off and nearly scared me into the filing cabinet.

I jumped, knocked over a pen cup, swore at nobody, and hit the intercom button. "Hello?"

"Oh, thank God, someone's actually up there." It was Felix, from across the hall. His voice carries, that warm slightly scratchy thing it does. "I am locked out. Completely. I left my keycard sitting on my kitchen counter like an absolute genius, the super doesn't pick up after nine, and I saw your light on over here. Can I wait somewhere with a chair?"

I laughed. I couldn't help it. "Felix. How long have you lived here?"

"Four years! And it's the first time, I swear. Will you buzz me in? I'll owe you a drink. Or a kidney. Your choice."

I pressed the door release and heard it clunk. Through the window I watched him cross the quiet street below, this tall loose-limbed figure in a leather jacket, and I felt something loosen in my chest that had been tight all week.

Felix is like this, and yes, I said I'd get to him, I'm getting to him. He's forty-six, freelance graphic designer, lives directly across the hall from me. We've been neighbors for two years. We've exchanged maybe four hundred hellos, a casserole when my power went out, and a truly epic argument about whether the upstairs neighbor's cat is ugly or merely homely. I take the pro-cat side, I want that noted. He takes the ugly side, out of spite.

He's also, and I noticed this for the first time maybe two months ago, attractive. Silver coming in at his temples. Gray in the stubble. The kind of face that looks like it's enjoyed things.

The stairwell door banged open and a minute later he was in my office doorway, hands raised in surrender, looking around at the exposed brick and the track lighting like he'd never seen it before.

"You poor woman," he said. "All these fluorescent lights and no one to appreciate your suffering."

"They're not fluorescent, they're..."

"Alissa. It's nearly ten. Let me have this."

I laughed again, which was becoming a pattern. "Do you want a drink? There's a fridge in the break room. The options are white wine in a box, a beer that's been in there since probably the summer, and sparkling water."

"What kind of sparkling water?"

"The lime kind."

"Then it's a hard choice between the box wine and the lime water. What are you having?"

I considered the box wine. I really did. "Lime water. I've got three more pages of this garbage and I refuse to be tipsy for them."

He came back with two bottles of lime sparkling water and sat himself down in the chair across from my desk like he owned the place, which, honestly, is a very Felix move. He cracked his can, took a sip, and looked at me over it.

"So. Tomorrow's the day, isn't it?"

I groaned and put my face in my hands. "Oh my God, I told you about that? Months ago!"

"Last June. You said, and I quote, 'the big three-oh is going to be a load of garbage and I'm preemptively mad about it.'"

"I did not say preemptively."

"You absolutely did. You were holding a candle that wouldn't stay lit and being very dramatic about it."

The candle thing sounded like me. That's the annoying part. I peeked at him through my fingers and he was grinning, relaxed, legs stretched out, completely at ease, and I thought, not for the first time, that Felix occupies his own skin better than anyone I've ever met. There's no apology anywhere on the man. Forty-six and comfortable like it's a place he's lived his whole life.

"Can I ask you something?" I said, pulling the tab on my lime water. "And you can tell me it's none of my business."

"Those are usually the best questions. Ask."

"When you turned forty, did it feel like... okay, this is going to sound insane, but did it feel like a deadline? For anything?"

He tilted his head and actually thought about it, which I appreciated. A lot of people would have just laughed.

"No," he said. "Because I'd spent my thirties figuring out what I actually wanted instead of what I was supposed to want. By forty the deadline feeling was just gone. It never really comes back, either. That's the secret nobody tells you." He took another sip. "Why? What's looming for you at thirty?"

And there it was, the question I'd been dodging all week, sitting in my own office where I couldn't dodge it, from a man holding a lime sparkling water.

"This is going to sound..."

"Alissa. I watched you argue with a vending machine for six minutes once. Nothing you say will make me think less of you."

I laughed, then took a breath and just said it. "I feel like I've been performing my whole life. Good at my job, good at birthdays, good at dating, good at... at all of it, on paper. And underneath I don't even know what I want. Like, actually want. It's embarrassing. I'm twenty-nine years old, Felix, and I don't know what I want, and tomorrow everyone's going to sing at me and I'm going to feel like a fraud with a cake."

The office went quiet. Track lighting hummed. He set his can down on my desk, which he never does, Felix is very much a coaster person, and looked at me, gray stubble and warm eyes and all.

"Can I be straight with you about something?"

"Please."

"You're not broken. You're just early. Some people figure out what they want at nineteen and some at sixty and the ones who figure it out late are usually happier, because they had to mean it." He paused. "Also, for what it's worth, you're not the fraud at the party. The frauds are the ones who never ask the question at all."

I sat with that. I didn't know what to say, so I said, "The vending machine was out of the good crackers, it was justified."

"It was," he agreed, and grinned, and something in my chest did a thing I wasn't ready to name yet. "So. What do you actually want, right now, tonight? Small scale. Not the meaning-of-life version."

I looked at my three remaining pages of reports, then at him, then at the window where the quiet street sat doing nothing under the streetlights.

"Small scale?"

"Start there. That's how you learn."

* * *

I finished my three pages with Felix sitting there scrolling on his phone like it was the most natural thing in the world, and honestly? The pages went faster with him there. Nobody tells you that. Company makes the garbage work lighter.

When I hit save he looked up.

"Done?"

"Done. Just under the wire for my birthday, technically."

"It's not midnight yet?"

"It's 10:52. An hour and change of twenty-nine left."

"Then you've got time," he said, and the way he said it had a quality, and I looked up from my laptop and he was watching me with this expression I couldn't file anywhere. Not pity. Not the look guys give you when they're doing math about your age either. Just... attention. Real attention, aimed right at me, and I realized I'd been holding my shoulders up around my ears for about an hour.

"What?" I asked, because he was still looking.

"You just got tense. All over. Like somebody flipped a switch."

"I did not."

"You did. Right when you saved the file. Watch." He nodded at my shoulders. "There. See that?"

And okay, fine, my shoulders had crept up. They do that. I made myself drop them and they immediately crept halfway back, the traitors.

"It's the birthday thing," I admitted. "Once I stop working I can feel it coming. Like weather."

"Which part of it?"

"The part where I'm supposed to have things figured out by now. Including..." I waved a hand vaguely, which covered a lot of embarrassing ground.

"Ah." He set his phone down. Then he said the thing that rearranged my whole evening.

"You look like someone who's been told she should already know how to do this."

"Do what? This what?"

"Want things. Ask for things. Take pleasure without apologizing for it." He said it plainly, the way he says everything, no lean-in, no leer. "That's the tension I'm seeing. Not the deadline. The feeling that there's a test you missed the study session for."

My mouth actually fell open a little, which is very dignified on a woman about to turn thirty. "Is it that obvious?"

"Only to someone who spent ten years being that person. I recognized the posture."

"So what, I'm just supposed to... what, intuit it? Everyone else seems to have gotten the manual."

"Nobody got the manual, Alissa. Most people just fake it longer than you have." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked at me straight on. "Here's a question, and answer it honestly, because I won't pry further. Has anyone ever actually shown you? Slowly? Somebody who paid attention and said, this is how you find out what you like?"

I thought about the coworker at my old firm, the three months when I was twenty-seven, which had involved a lot of me performing enthusiasm and a lot of him not noticing. "No," I said. "Not really. Everyone always acted like I should already... like it was embarrassing to have to ask."

"Can I show you something? Right now. Nothing more than that, and you can say no and we go back to your spreadsheets and it's forgotten."

My heart picked up, and I noticed, and I let myself notice that I was noticing. "Okay," I said. Then, because apparently I was practicing already, "Yes. Show me."

He got up, came around my desk, and took my hand. "May I?"

"You're already holding it."

"I'm asking about what comes next." Which, note to self, that's how it's done. I nodded.

He turned my hand over and drew one finger slowly along the inside of my wrist, up the soft part of my forearm, all the way to the bend of my elbow, and back down. Just that. Barely anything. And I got goosebumps like an idiot, full arm, because nobody had ever bothered with that part of me in my entire life.

"Feel that?" he asked.

"That's... huh."

"Desire lives in the spaces people usually skip. Wrists. The inside of the elbow. The back of the knee. Everyone's in a hurry to get to the destination and the whole map is made of the places in between." He did the line again, slower, and I shivered, and he smiled like he'd been handed a receipt. "There she is."

"There she is what?"

"The person who wasn't broken after all. Your body's been fluent this whole time. You just