Bits of the flour mixture cling to the side, refusing their fate as a stubborn child refuses the inevitability of bedtime. Hurried hands turn dials to proper settings, 350 degrees Fahrenheit. It is your birthday, it has to be perfect. Your favorite. I don’t know what your favorite is, but you are my favorite so I will make your favorite. Chocolate. Chocolate is everyone’s favorite. So it will be your favorite today, just like you are my favorite every day. Please be happy with chocolate, please be happy with me?
I am so happy you are here, even though you aren’t really here. Your closeness is enough to make me feel as though I can reach out and touch the part of you that is miles away, the part that can’t be mine.
Happy birthday, I love you… scrawled in swirly handwriting across a hallmark greeting card found at a drug store for $3.25. $3.25 plus tax allows me to tell you that you are the best friend a girl could ask for and that I wish you all the happiness in the world on this day of days. And every day.
Bits of cake batter accidentally drop on the card and envelope, quickly wiped away, but still leave a mark, just like all the feelings I have for you dropped accidentally into my heart and were quickly wiped away, but a mark still remained. You are there, right there where I don’t want you to be, but love you to be.
I have tried to tell you on notebook paper or in a carefully thought out gift, wrapped with love and gold foil… and in the lines of each song I send to you. But you never quite seem to hear what it is I am trying to say. “I love you, too” isn’t said the response I need, not the way you say it, like you think I am silly and unaware of what I actually feel.
Nothing really works out the way its supposed to, except this cake, this cake will be perfect. Scrape thick brown batter into pans laced with flour and oil. Open and close the oven doors, 23-28 minutes until perfection is achieved. Unless we’re at high elevation, which I am. Sigh
Buzzer rings, cakes sit out, cooling like my feelings unspoken and unannounced.
Frosting covers imperfections and glosses over the general shape of things. I think my love might do that for our friendship. I love you, therefore I don’t care when you don’t call for two months, I don’t care that you can kiss me and say her name in the same minutes, I don’t care if I say I love you and you sigh like an old man sighs at the antics of a toddler, as long as you respond eventually. Love is my frosting. I hate frosting.You aren’t here. Your cake is in the bottom of a plastic bag, and the paper words proclaiming my feelings smeared beyond all recognition. It’s fine. You didn’t know. How could you? I never said it out loud.
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