93 candles burn hot.
It took me almost an hour to light them all. By the time I lit the final one, the first had almost entirely melted away.
I sat at my kitchen table, alone, looking at the cheap sheet cake I bought from the local walmart, the entire surface nearly covered in one unbroken layer of flame.
I feel every day of 93 years old. I am alone in my house. I had a son and a wife once, decades ago. He passed when I was young still. Car accident. My dear wife passed away in her sleep four years ago on New Years morning.
No grandchildren. No nursing staff - I don't want one. No more friends, they're all long gone. Only Jerry is left, but he doesn't remember much, sitting like a vegetable in whatever home they stuck him in.
In many ways, I've been told, I'm blessed. My legs work, my brain works, I can still drive, albeit very slowly, and only around the block to the walmart. I've got my wits about me.
But I am, well and truly, alone. My life - the parts of my life seperate and apart from myself - are already over. I am sitting alone in my kitchen about to blow out a propane torches worth of birthday candles, to celebrate another empty year.
I miss everybody so much.
I don't know what compelled me to do it, but I reached out and started plucking candles from the cake. I tried to remember, with each candle I took out, what that years birthday looked like. 92 through 90 were all the same kitchen table, the same cake. 89 was a year of incredible sadness.
But starting at 88, things got better. My wife was still around. She would make my birthdays into something really special. We didn't exchange gifts, but created experiences for each other. In my 88th year, she brought me to the Opera. I'd never been.
Back I went, pulling away candles one by one. 75 we road elephants at the Bronx Zoo. 71 we took a week long wood working class together. At 67 we were still able to travel easily and took a trip to Thailand.
Back and back, experience after experience, my life played out before my eyes, until I finally arrived at that fateful year. 39. My son's last birthday with me. The next day he drove back to Boston and got caught in the storm of '87.
I couldn't bring myself to go farther. Some exercises are just too painful. With a large blow, the wind of a younger man in an old man's body, I blew out the candles that remained.
The night passed like all other nights. Sleep came, and I dove into it, wondering quietly, without fear, whether another morning would come.
I awoke in the same room, bathed in the bright morning sun.
But the bed was different, the sheets were purple again, and an old friend's perfume lingered in the air.
I heard a buzz of activity in the kitchen and I lay there for a long time, listening.
Their voices came through the bedroom door, jovial, impossible, warm. My wife's laugh. My son's deep baritone.
I feared it was a dream.
I went to find out.