Happy Birthday to Meeeeee

I might like to take a minute to indulge in some self-pity. It's that time of year when I feel the infinite hope and the infinite sadness, and the infinite beauty, and the infinite sadness. The air, the sun, the way you wake up one day wearing shorts and everything is hot and oppressive and sweaty, and you're eating red swedish fish and nacho cheese doritos, and you're trying not to think about anything at all, because it all seems so unreal that you know you've said goodbye and you're just waiting for his body to finally stop, and then you blink and you're waking up but it's too cold for shorts but you don't have anything else to wear, and the air outside is golden but you're inside an airless grey isolation room, saying goodbye to your best friend forever. But you can't get past the beauty that's continuing all around you, and you can't help but believe that el bien esta ya cerca (habiendo durado mucho el mal), but it all seems too sad to be so beautiful, and too beautiful to be so sad, and you can't quite reconcile the beauty and the hope and the sadness, so you sit there on the dock and watch the water and watch the sun, and remember how when you were little, and you were out sailing, you would pretend that the bright golden squiggles from the sunlight reflecting on the little windblown waves were electric eels, and you would dip your hand over the edge of the boat and try to catch them, but they would slip through your fingers. So you sat there in the sunshine, and the cool breeze, and you felt warm and cold, and sad and hopeful, and lonely, lonely, all alone, and you ate Ring-O-Noodle soup out of a Corningware mug, and you thought maybe if you could just be still, all the panic would go away and all the beauty would make sense. And ten years later, you look at all the beauty and all the hope and all the goodness that could ever exist in the world, all shining out at you from the little smiling face of your young son, and it all finally does start to make sense.