Happy first

 A year ago I was screaming and begging for my life to meet you.

Maybe I still am, internally, but there's nobody coaxing or helping me this time. I give myself laughing gas trying to take my mind off the blinding pain, but it still goes through. You're out of me, but I'm still out of it.

I've been in this dark place many times before. From losing a years-long relationship, a couple boxed drinks, a soul way younger than you. I'm familiar with the fire and my mind engulfing each other, me in the process. 

These aren't things I want to tell you, be it now or twenty years down the road. This isn't the side of me I want you to read about. But why would I keep the truth from you? Maybe you'd be the kind to romanticise your mother's struggles for the hell of it.

You'd tell your peers about the wars your parents have fought, joke about their exaggerated trails to school. You'd post pictures of us from the roaring 20s, not a trace of the wrinkles and silver hair. And I'll just be the background in your arc. 

For you to arrive to that point, I need to pull myself together first. I've already lost more than a month with you, breaking down and pining for things that are not your fault. I have to be the one to hold you while you take your first steps, lead you onto the many paths life shows you. Because at the end of it all, I want to be your best person, even when I'm at my worst.

So here my happiness and identity are at loggerheads, the latter being what led me to this very moment of mine. But I have to leave it behind and choose you now, my source of the former. Happy first birthday, and happiness first. You first. I will give you the childhood and youth I am owed, I will give you what I'll never be paid back.