I found you a year ago on this day, and I promised to wish you not virtually the next time around. I failed the geography of that promise, but not the truth of it. This is not just pixels on a screen. It is a heartbeat sent across the wire.

Happy Birthday.

It’s late. Or early. The hours no longer obey logic when my mind settles on your name.

I am writing this because I don’t know how to be quiet when it comes to you. I told myself I would be. I would let the silence stay heavy. But the ghosts are back in the room. Kafka is sitting in that same chair, thinner now, watching the door. He’s not whispering about Milena tonight. He’s just looking at the calendar, reminding me that time moves even when we try to freeze it in letters.

A year ago, I promised you truth. I promised presence. I wanted to stand in front of you, without the safety of a screen or the distance of a letter, and offer this wish in the solid, terrifying real world.

For a while, I let the ghosts convince me that distance meant the end. That because I couldn’t keep the promise of presence, I shouldn’t speak at all. But here is the truth. You never left the walls. You are in the burnt coffee, the salt in the air, the way the light hits the floor at 4:00 a.m.

I don’t know where we stand. Maybe we are strangers again. Maybe we are ghosts of the people who once wrote to each other to forget each other. And here, against every fear, this letter is my way of keeping that promise without pretending to be more than I am or less than I feel. I know you exist. And somehow, that has always mattered more than proximity, more than continuity, more than the neatness of outcomes.

So, for today, let the abyss be quiet. Tonight, I am leaving the ghosts in the hallway. Kafka can stay in his chair. Sylvia can keep her bell jar. Let the birds stop slamming for just a second. This is not about them, and it isn’t about my fever or my bruises.

It’s just about you.

I hope your day is gentle. I hope it doesn’t ask you to perform happiness and lets you enjoy the quiet joys. I hope the world treats you with the same tenderness you sometimes hide from yourself. Thoughtful, unfinished, human.

Birthdays do this strange thing. They make existence visible. They say you are here; you have lasted, the world has turned with you in it. There are people we meet, and there are people we notice.

And for me, your being here has always been enough to warrant that kind of attention. Like a sentence that doesn’t demand attention yet changes the paragraph around it. Knowing you adjusted something in me. Quietly. Permanently.

There are many things I could say about the past, about paths crossing and uncrossing, but today doesn’t need accounting. Today only needs acknowledgment. And this is mine.

I’m glad I know you.
I’m glad I once learned the shape of your thoughts.
I’m glad the world contains you, not as an idea, not as a memory, but as a living, breathing fact.

I am still here. I am still messy. I am still a spill of words. And I am still wishing for you everything that is bliss and nothing that is abyss.

Happy Birthday.
Not as a reach, not as a return,
just as something sincere, offered without weight.

Yours,
(from a distance, but not absent)

-	February 5, New York