As an adult who’s about to turn 24, the end of the summer shouldn’t mean much to me besides the observance of store windows advertising “back to school” deals and kids whooping outside my window at 7.30am. But as soon as the calendar creeps past mid-August, I still experience a dread so extreme I feel like faking a stomach bug to get my mom to write me a sick note.
Growing up, my birthday – which is today, 21 August – struck fear into the hearts of schoolchildren across the country. The day was never just about cake, candles and amateur face painting; it was about name tags and syllabi chock full of dead men (and Jane Austen). It was about parties cut short so friends could get home and finish their required reading. It was about the most excruciating exercise of adolescence: get-to-know-you icebreaker games.
This tradition lasted until I transferred colleges after my freshman year, and that decision resulted in not one, but two rounds of freshman orientations, both on my birthday.
After my second orientation at a new school on my 19th birthday, a boy I had met that day and I drove to the grocery store to buy beer for another sad, anonymous, first-day-of-school birthday. When I handed the cashier my obviously fake ID, she inspected the fake date of birth on the card, looked at me in a resigned way, and let me buy the beer. She didn’t even know she was failing to wish me a happy birthday.
Hours after my 20th birthday, I shipped out to India for my semester abroad, where I developed an intestinal parasite so severe I almost literally couldn’t stop pooping for four months.
On my 21st, I tried to avoid the school + birthday combination and went on a trip with my parents to the Adirondacks, where there was little cell reception and virtually no humans. We made it through that weekend alive and they drove me straight down to my college in the central New York state where my roommates threw me, all things considered, an exceedingly normal and fun birthday party. Covered in gold body glitter and smudged black lipstick, I remember thinking, “No more first day of school birthdays, ever again.” Then I fell asleep hugging a quesadilla like a baby blanket.
And then, there was no school left. Still, late August grips me with its sticky-hot melancholy. This is a dolefulness wherein your bones – the same ones which craved warmth all winter – are brittle again not from the cold, but from the sun. Your inner thighs are chafed and your face is hot pink even though you’re wearing SPF 50. The summer’s winding down, you yearn for new episodes of prestige dramas on television, and you might even miss school a little bit.
For years, I’ve tried to find a sympathetic, maybe awe-inspiring figure who shares my birthday, someone who may have written an essay or uttered an away message-worthy quotation about the dejectedness of its birth month. I’ve come up short.
The most illustrious August 21 birthdays I’ve found belong to TV actress Hayden Panettiere (21 August 1989), The Hills’ Brody Jenner (21 August 1983), and country music superstar Kenny Rogers (21 August 1938). While all three had a fairly embarrassingly profound impact on my childhood, none of them wrote a moving poem about this time of year. Ditto for important dates in history: as far as I can tell, all that ever happened on my birthday was Hawaii’s statehood (21 August 1959) and the first hot air balloon flight over the Alps (21 August 1972).
I’ll likely go back to school within the next year or two for a degree that won’t prolong my life or anyone else’s (my useless academic passions are creative writing and women’s studies), and I anticipate at least a few more birthdays wherein I play mandatory, stilted improv games at an orientation program with fully grown strangers.
At least, there’s comfort in knowing that late August is hard for everyone.
