It happens like this, like this exactly: you celebrate your 48th birthday the Saturday after Black Friday of 2021. You’re at work of course, at your day job as a retail leader at a luxury goods store. You bike home, order fancy takeout, eat cake, pet your cat. Having a birthday the week of Thanksgiving and working in retail, usually means compromises on when you can celebrate it, but in general after almost a half century of birthdays, even the celebrations are pretty low key. You look forward more to Thanksgiving spent with friends, with food, with drink. Being surrounded by people who love you is a better gift than most.

You hunker down and make it through the Portland winter. The city has milder winters than most places, but it’s still cold and grey and you never realize how much that affects your mood until spring comes. You have a tense exchange with a troll in real life at a shoot, eat half of a stale edible cookie to chill out, and trip balls so hard that your neighbor has to call the EMTs and your friend Nick, until you come down from the terrible, unmanageable high. This is gonna make great content, your brain thinks through the fog, as your jaw clenches and your claw hands scratch your thighs and you rock back and forth in her kitchen.

Speaking of trolls, you’re invited by the lovely Dylan Marron to be on his podcast, “Conversations With People Who Hate Me“, as a lead up to his book being released. Dylan is a content creator, activist, and and writer whose audacious project about starting conversations between diametrically opposed people is a huge hit. You see, on Twitter, your art is roundly mocked. The first couple of times you were “mass trolled” on there it affected you deeply, but you learned since then to just shrug it off. Part of being a public figure is to accept that your creative output isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, and to build a thick skin.

Before a couple years ago, when your art blew up, you didn’t think twice of putting your face in most of your art. It was your running joke, your commentary on social media, to be in most of your work. But now, your face was inextricably linked to wildly popular pieces that became memes, got shared hundreds of thousands of times to millions of people. You get recognized every time you leave your house! You get free stuff from brands! You get praised on dating apps before being sent dick pics!

You also, however, learn to start distrusting the motives of people who you already weren’t friends with before the art blew up. You now you spend your time mostly with people you knew from a few years before (you’ll call this 2019 BBG, or Before “Balloon Guy”). No, no, you’re not really a celebrity per se, and no you don’t have such an inflated ego that you think everyone on the planet is out to make friends with you, but you decline far more dates than you go on, and you don’t hang out with new people unless you have mutual friends. You naturally have the personality of a golden retriever, but this is who you are now, out of caution: you don’t let new people in.

Spring of 2022 in Portland is its usual “like Mother Nature came all over the place” and your artistic output doubles. Most of your installations are made outside, and over the winter of your hands started exhibiting an alarming condition: your fingertips would get freezing, immobile, and all blood would seemingly be drained out of them. This is exactly as gross as it sounds. It has a name, too: Raynaud’s disease, where the blood vessels in your fingertips constrict. When you learn it can be caused by cold or stress or anxiety, you’re like HAHA TAKE YOUR PICK. But Spring and Summer provide relief and you can do installations as often as you have the free time.

Someone who’s been an acquaintance for about a year, Sam, comes to you: he’s been broken up with in an abrupt and insensitive way, and you recognize the haunted look in his eyes. It’s the same haunted look you saw on your own face in the mirror after David left, many years before, in much the same way. You take a deep breath, and finally decide to do the unthinkable: you decide to let Sam in to your life.

You befriend him slowly, spending more and more time together. You remember how it felt after David, how you welcomed new experiences and distractions of all kinds, and you try to provide the same for Sam. There’s a big difference in age, in interests, and the two of you marvel that you’re even friends, except that it’s so easy and effortless when you’re together, you love each others’ company. Through his friendship, you start feeling invigorated with your art, you are inspired, you are renewed. You invite him to shoots, and he’s the perfect assistant; he’s a quick problem solver, is fast, and is fun to be around. You start feeling something you haven’t felt in a while: you feel young again. You don’t know it then, but this will be the happiest you’ll be all year, you won’t be this happy again, probably for a while.

It’s a throwaway comment, really, that your mutual friend Lara throws out at you one day, that starts it all. She casually mentions your crush on Sam and although you knew (and confessed only to him) that you had developed a little crush, you realize at that moment that you now think you had Feelings with a capital F. You go home that day and cry out of frustration: you didn’t want this, and you know how this ends, with an inevitable rejection. You come clean as quickly as possible to him, he’s gracious and agrees to give it some thought. You do your best to be patient for his response, but one night at a club celebrating a mutual friend’s birthday, you make a huge mistake and after hugging Sam hello, you let your hand linger on the small of his back suggestively. It’s one of the worst weeks of your life after he asks to talk to you a couple days later, and when you eventually meet, he accepts your deep apology for violating a physical boundary, and accepts your commitment to do better, but he makes clear the romantic potential is off the table. You’re relieved, and for the rest of the friendship, you keep your commitment to making him feel safe; even to the point of only hugging him goodbye when he initiates it.

You then focus on figuring out the relationship of the romantic feelings to the friendship, and how they can be diminished. Strangely enough, when you and Sam hang out from that point on, it feels like enough. In person, you don’t need more; you see a long future as close friends. It’s when you’re apart that the romantic feelings weirdly resurface. You decide to get a therapist for the first time in almost six years: you need help figuring this out, but you’re grateful to have Sam by your side as you solve this problem.

It turns out to be too little too late, as Sam texts you while you’re on a trip and you blow up at him about his seeming lack of empathy for what you’re going through. When you get back, the two of you come to the table prepared to end the friendship but over the conversation you both come to understand where the other was coming from. It’s with great surprise then, that he says that he still wants to part ways when you’re willing to give it one last chance. He opens his mouth one last time, and ruins everything: “I started thinking maybe you were interested in me the entire time, that the friendship was just a cover for you wanting me.”

This bounces around in your head for days, weeks afterwards. He thinks I befriended him from the beginning just to fuck him, you think to yourself, which hilariously and tragically turns into I think my friend just called me a groomer?? Circumstances force the two of you to be in each others’ company at least a couple times a week, during which time you do your best to pretend he simply doesn’t matter to you. He interprets this as hostility, and things get frosty between the two of you. Your heart breaks in new and unexpected ways every day.

In the end, you just miss your friend.

You get the text at work one day, the text you’ve feared getting for years, from your half-sister Jeanne: “Dad has fallen”. Your 88 year old father, whose mobility isn’t great to begin with, was found on his bathroom floor by a neighbor who noticed he didn’t collect his paper from the driveway the day before. He wasn’t discovered for an entire day, and is rushed to the hospital. You find out later that while he was on the bathroom floor, waiting during that day for help that may never arrive, he made peace with God, prepared for his end.

It’s with a complicated mix of relief and grief, then, that your family is told the reality of the situation: he is lucid, he is stable, but he has a litany of health problems, many exacerbated by the fall, and they inevitably will start domino-ing and lead to him passing soon. The medical care switches gears to hospice care. He understands this, and the first thing he says on the phone when the two of you talk is his matter-of-fact, “Wellp, I guess this is the place where I’m at for the rest of my life.” He is in no or very little pain, and over the conversation you both express wonder at how decent he feels when there’s such a final diagnosis looming. He is his usual funny but German-stoic self, and you’re grateful that you have time left with him, however uncertain the amount of time.

There is a monstrous, fur-covered creature who lives in your apartment with you, demands that you feed it, makes you clean its shit up, and feels entitled to your affection when it deems fit. Well, okay, it’s your cat Ned, the ultimate gaslighter. In this year of looming loss, you’re aware that he’s getting skinnier, getting more slight, and his age shows in his slowly protruding hipbones, his slightly cloudy eyes. This past summer, he suddenly got over his agoraphobia and marched out of your apartment door and into the lobby every chance the little asshole would get, so you scooped him up, put his harness on, and took him outside. You would spend the summer evenings with the two of y’all’s routine: get home, pour a glass of wine, and go outside with him. You’d say hi to neighbors and he would chew the shit out of grass with his remaining teeth. Then you’d finish up your wine and he would throw up the grass, and the two of you would head inside. You relish these simple moments with him and pray this isn’t your last summer together.

This past week, he’s on your lap as you’re streaming a movie. He clears his throat.

Ned: “So how’s getting ready for the trip going?”

Me: “It’s okay. I’m working every day but I think I finally got most of my errands run. I just still have to pack.”

Ned: “Who do you have taking care of me this time?”

Me: “Jane and Michael, from upstairs. You like them?”

Ned: “Oh yeah, they spend lots of time with me. Good scritches. Quality lap time.”

Me: “Oh good. I had a feeling you liked them.”

Ned (pauses, as in thought): “Hey so uh, this birthday post is longer than a lot of them. You had a busy year.”

Me: “Oh yeah sure.”

Ned: “The part about your friend. You uh went into a lot of detail.”

Me: “Oh sure, I guess. Why are you bringing this up?”

Ned: “Just saying I noticed.”

Me: “I guess it’s still fresh for me. It also kind of helped me work out the timeline of what happened, made me miss the beginning of it before it got clunky and weird.”

Ned: “Did you write that hoping he would see it?”

Me: “I thought about that. No I don’t think so. I think I wrote it for me? I think mostly to remember how it felt to let someone in and have it initially be great.”

Ned: “That makes sense. You should write in this more.”

Me: “Only like two people read my stuff. Oh hey, I just realized cats can’t talk.”

You’ll remember 2022 as the year your art finally started paying off and making the leap to being a full-time artist possible, maybe even inevitable. You start booking lucrative jobs, and then it happens: you sign a book deal with Penguin books, for two titles coming out in 2024, and you get ready to pitch your self-published novel to them, too. You breathe a sign of relief. You’ve largely been able to make a little money through brand deals, but there’s something slightly off-brand about collaborating with panty companies, so making moves like attending residencies and art festivals instead, feels like it legitimizes the art more. On this, the morning of your 49th birthday, you look over at your packed suitcase. Holy fucking shit. In a few days, you will debut your art in Miami at Art Basel.

Sitting at your desk, you pick up your phone, this weird slab of black glass that gave you so much of your life’s headlines this year. You open your photos, scroll back to see the memories from this year. There’s pics of Ned. There’s your dad, and some of your art. There is Sam. You scroll farther back, there’s your mom in San Antonio. There’s your trip to Los Angeles, your trip to London and sweet Peter. You scroll back, faster this time, the photos a blur. There you are, moving to Portland nine years ago from Los Angeles, knowing one person here, scared and reckless. Faster, your finger swipes up the phone’s surface like it’s making it rain, there you are in Los Angeles, there’s an ex, Charlie, there’s his poor sweet Cat dying in your arms and there you are getting young Ned handed over to you in a Walgreens parking lot in the middle of the night, in a fake Louis Vuitton cat carrier.

Faster now, your finger is a blur, how are these photos even on here, this was before camera phones. Outside your living room it flips from day to night, faster and faster, it’s now a strobe effect flashing through your blinds. You’re living in Chicago, you’re in college, you’re in middle school, you finally stop. Your finger holds its place on a grainy photo of you. The light outside stops strobing.

Now you remember this photo being taken. You were at home, wearing your favorite red shirt. You looked back, someone was taking your picture, maybe it was your mom. You remember this now. You looked into the lens, through it, you saw a man with a beard and big glasses sitting at a desk typing, maybe thirty, forty years older than you looking at you from inside the camera, like a reflection but not quite. He was going grey, he looked like he was used to being disappointed but he seemed mostly happy.

The shadows outside have slowed and stopped, the light rests at a dim sepiatone. The boy in the photo sees you looking, he smiles. You smile back. You were wrong, the older you, you thought your life was getting towards evening, you thought it was getting towards the end. The boy smiled because he knew better.

He knew the best stuff was coming.