Okay Aana Minhaz. I don’t know about you. But your b’day is such a special day for me. This year especially. I fell into several nostalgic rabbit holes of your am3 clicks and emails and college pictures and I realize I had forgotten so much of it. I remember the feeling of it though and that feeling is my anchor. In a world going up in flames, that feeling and the distant memory of lying on the floor of your room talking about nothing and everything – that is my safe place – an uncomplicated place, away from real life. And you make that space. Not just for me – for everyone who knows you. I think back now and think of all the times you’d have viva questions for us. Questions that came from all the different thought-threads that wonderful brain of yours would cook up. Sometimes it’d show a truth about others that even they hadn’t yet realized. And to me that defined you – the inquisitiveness and purposefulness – the wanting to know and the knowing of the why.
I realized today that I’ve known you for more than 17 years – that is almost half our lifetime. And I can’t even say I’ve loved to see you grow up. Because when I met you – you already were grown up. You were an old soul who had seen so much more than her 18 years of age. In the last several years, the body has just been catching up with where the brain was at. And it still has a long way to go.
This year for your b’day Aana Minhaz, I’ve the worst wishes a friend could wish for you. This year I hope you feel immense sadness and despair. I hope you fall asleep on a pillow drenched with your tears. I hope you find your heart grow heavy until it cracks. Because where there has been such despair, there will also be space for great happiness and joy. And I hope that you know that you will not just find this intangible happiness but that you will make it with your own hands. Yes, the world will still continue on its one way journey to hell in a million different ways. And the sheer helplessness of it will make you want to go numb. But I hope you’ll know that ‘The strange thing about life, the wondrous thing about life, is that it is impossible to dull one hue of our emotional experience without dulling the entire spectrum, impossible to feel deeply at one end of it without feeling as deeply at the other.’ And knowing this, if given a chance to dull all the hues or feel every single tragedy of this inglorious world, I hope you will choose to feel.
As someone once said Aana Minhaz, the heart is a muscle. So, this year I hope you exercise it often, strengthen it, build it up and send it to the biggest muscle contests and that it wins all them awards for being the most badass muscle of them all. I love ya woman. Happy b’day!