I hate myself a little for saying this, and while I love my family, I can’t help but feel this deep knot in my stomach — a loneliness that has pricked my skin since the moment I opened my eyes on my 19th day.

I hung out with my friends, yet nothing fulfilling occurred. No surprise. No gift. No token of affection. No feeling of “this day is different.” Instead, I was filled with this void of “You are old, and you were happy, and now you’re not.”

My mind keeps snaking back to last year, when I had him — when even though the bubble I lived in would burst in less than a month, I was happy. Happier than I’d ever been. I had my friends, yes, but (and this memory has haunted me all day) when everyone stopped singing happy birthday, and I made my wish — a wish to freeze that moment forever — I looked up, and there was him.

Devotion filled his eyes. While I hugged everyone briefly, my body was pulled toward him like a magnetic force. He hugged me, kissed me, and wrapped me in the warmest embrace of my life. I could’ve looked any way, far from beautiful, yet I felt the luckiest — because there he was, looking at me like I was the only star in a pitch-black sky.

It was foreign — not because I lacked love as a child, but because no one had ever loved me like that. I was the winter, and his embrace was the soothing breeze of spring, coaxing life to grow again.

This fickle memory tugs at my heartstrings in a way that aches beyond explanation. Even though it’s been months — nearly a year — since the rupture, the ache tonight feels fresh. I think part of me still had hope: that he’d say “happy birthday,” maybe even something more. That he’d be courteous, since I had been. But nothing came.

I am a fool, and selfish. To expect my friends to offer that kind of devotion is unrealistic. Yet I feel like a starved man, once given the taste of being loved ferociously, now ripped away from it — blinded, padding the walls, searching for what I once found.

The loneliness filling my heart tastes like the salty tears I’ve shed since the clock struck midnight on August 11. The ticking whispers, “You were 18, and you were happy.”