By Jessi Kim

I’m not a hugger. I’ve never braided your hair or kissed the apples of your cheeks. I rarely text, much less call. The words ‘i love you’ are prisoned to the back of my throat, never to take flight. When I see you link arms with other friends with stabler smiles and softer hands, I stuff my clock, leaving not a minute for you. I go into my cave, curl up and wonder why I’m so quick to pull out my scissors and snip our ties. 

I’m a not-so-great friend, you see. No, you deserve stronger language than that. I’m a pathetic excuse for a friend. Sure, no friend is perfect, but not everyone is a green-eyed beast that hoards attention in its musty, spiraled lair. 

But you should know that I still have your birthday cards. Every single one of them. 

On the coldest day of the year, which is objectively mid-January, I am reminded that I am a year older and don’t know what to do with my hands that are so empty of gifts, heat, and, well, your hands. 

Well, I think. I’m going to cry on my birthday anyway. 

This is when I pull out your birthday cards, dormant in a storage box under my bed. I’m flooded just looking at your handwriting: a piece of your soul, once stirred inside your brain, translated into tangible code through the pen. You know that I love those fifteen

dollar pop-up cards because you once caught me staring at them longingly at the Prudential Mall a few years ago. So you left class early to pick out a card for me at the local Hallmark shop. You slipped the card under my door at midnight so that I may wake up to your handwriting the next morning. 

Happy 19th birthday! I’m so glad I met you. you’re truly like a sister to me. You are my rock. Happy (early) 20th to the best! So happy I get to celebrate yet another bday with you. You’re finally 21! no more fake ID. Let’s create more crazy and chaotic memories. xoxo. I hope your 22nd-best-year-ever-year is filled with lots of adventures, freedom, and good laughs! 

I was too motion sick to notice that you let me sit by the window seat on the lousy city bus. I was too hungry to thank you for offering me your pack of Haribo peach gummies because I hadn’t eaten dinner before my exams. I was too nervous about remembering my lines, pacing back and forth backstage for the Macbeth performance, to catch you sitting in the front row, fanning yourself with the program. I was too worried that you might throw up on my bed when you drunkenly exclaimed that you loved me. I was too [fill in the blank] to stop, seize the moment, and say I love you, my dear. My rock. You can answer this question: how many times have I blinked you out of my sight? 

Your birthday cards leave no room for interpretation. The love is staring right back at me, propped up around my trembling fingers. I wish for more of your birthday cards, more of your handwriting, more time, more of you. I hoard all tokens of you to get

through the deadest of winters, just like the gray squirrel that patrols the meadow next to our library. But eventually, the squirrel will find that the bushes will move with the frost. Mulberries will hang no more. The squirrel will reluctantly retreat to his burrow, shivering and cursing at time. 

It’s futile now. I’ll read your birthday cards every year with fresh tears springing down. But I’ll be careful so that my tears don’t ruin the ink. I’ll let them rest in the storage box underneath my bed until next year, and the year after, the year after. I’ll become ashes and dust before they do. I will always honor you.

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Jessi Kim is based in Boston and enjoys writing poems, lists, love letters, and prose. While she drinks chamomile tea, she often writes about the Moon, pure love, the horrors of capitalism, and the theater that is called life.