My birthday is not my birthday anymore, and it has not been for a while. My birthday is blurred in the edges where it starts and ends, swept away like the sand next to an overflowing ocean by time and distance. My birthday is a hazy hour in which I was conceived, but which hour and what day is no longer mine to choose. My birthday has ended before it has even started, in the eighth hour of the day that claims its name. My birthday has been stuck in that nonexistent in-between for the last nine years, like the dates that never make it on the calendar, like the five spares that make up for the meager the rest of the rotation leaves.

My birthday is the New Year’s. In January, my birthday is discarded amongst the red I save for an imaginary marriage. My birthday is outshone by the gold that decorates the halls of the emperors who seek to be one step below the heavens, too many steps into the altitude to feel sane. My birthday is dulled compared to the lacquer that coats the temples and the prayers that paint them brighter. My birthday is the psalms I send to another day, more glorious than mine and so far away that I cannot reach. My birthday is spent in praise and prayers to the temples I cannot visit and the places I cannot go. My birthday is not my birthday.

My birthday has not passed for two years. It will not let me grow older—I have not turned fifteen, and I am not sixteen. I have not moved since I was fourteen, and I am still stuck as I was seven. The years where I was three, four, six, nine, eleven weigh on me, but they do not count. They are merely fillers. But I have not gone home for my birthday in two years, and I will not mark my birthday in school. In this, I am fourteen, I am always fourteen, and yet I will never be older than seven—even now, scarcely seven, even now, forever fourteen. My birthday does not let me grow older; it keeps me the same age for longer. 

And I stand there, scarcely seven and forever fourteen, and I think I cannot get older. I cannot change until I am twenty-one, and I’ve moved enough to possibly leave this state. I will not realize my passing again until I am eighteen, eighteen and moved to college. Eighteen and moved again, like seven, like fourteen, to another place for “better opportunities”. Eighteen and serving the way history commands me to; I pray that my ancestors guide me in this path none of us have taken further than seven, further than fourteen, clutching the passport my parents forged in the citizenship we’ve had to hide for over a century. In the path that none of us has travelled before, but all their signatures are on my passport. I will be eighteen and nod at the time that passed and the work I’ve endured, then I will be twenty-one and leave again, out of state, perhaps out of the country. And it’s always that my birthday would’ve passed, but I will still be scarcely seven, and forever fourteen. And three, and four, and six, nine, eleven, fifteen, and eighteen will weigh upon me the way stones sink the corpses but raise the river. In the way pebbles let the crow drink.

When I am twenty-one, and three sevens and three-halves of fourteen, I will wonder what meets my age now. Is it the turn of twenty-one that allows me another epithet? I feel as if I cannot grow older the same way a soul cannot pass over until their lasting troubles are resolved. But my life clings with greedy desperation, even if time slips from my grip and so does memory. And so I cannot be resolved but banished in a way that is the best for me, like when I was fourteen, like when I was seven. In the way the ink stains my tears and the graphite makes its way to my lungs, I poison and bleed into the paper that folds into my origami heart.

And I hope my name carries into not only my name but Jade, Julius, Oliver, Dante—in the way that fools hope their name could be much more than one, in the way that some piece of a person is saved even in the names they couldn’t keep. I hope my name lasts like how authors do, in the way the foolish become valiant and not the forgotten brave. I hope my name lasts like the tragedy that’s always expected and the character that burns too bright, like Lucifer and Victor, protagonists but not heroes, and the way Antigone prays her lifeline away to the gods only to swear, alas, a curse. I hope my name lasts the shadow Jade casts, four years ago and starting a new language to never end. I hope the paint of my name rests in the curve of the J in Julius and sleeps in the embossing of Oliver, always so put together, and Dante’s iron cowl in Shelley’s novel–in the way I whisper it in the night and bold ink gleams on the covers of books I would never be able to publish at seven and fourteen and maybe twenty-one. And if I’m suddenly rational, I hope my name carries in the way bravery and not foolishness does, in the way that my ancestors had as paper sons and daughters of cut-out houses. 

But still, I am leaving China, scarcely seven. And I am stuck in the grim acceptance of boarding prestige, forever fourteen. And my birthday has not passed at school this year nor last year—it has ended at eight am with my family in Los Altos for too long, blown out like the candles I would light to Beijing time the previous morning, rushed like a scribbled afterthought before school. But my birthday hides behind the mahogany and golden embroidery of those gleaming imperial rooms that mock the gods, the bundles of sandalwood incense and shrine bells, far away from the churches I, treacherous, sneak into, praying to gods that didn’t hang on the cross. My birthday rages and lashes like the sea behind the closed weekends gleaming, beautiful Monterey traps me in, cypress jail bars and the beach as a moat. Yet my birthday is not my birthday because it buries my blood in the red of New Year’s and my name in the places people forget about and my candles in the stones grind to dust under rivers. 

My birthday has not been my birthday for an eternity because it looms in the period that doesn’t exist between distance and time; it forfeits its gravity for legacy and honour and forms just a mirage of a person with too many names and not enough calling them, stuck between the boundaries of oceans and bridges on hills that have burnt into the soul. And like a ghost that floats away from reincarnation, I wonder how many rounds of sevens and fourteens and twenty-ones-to-sevens again until my blood ink erases itself, so I may dissipate and simply give up on being freed. And how old will I be then, but seven, fourteen, twenty-one, and all the years that were merely a blink of the eye?