Thoughts

October's Very Own: Pizza and Cake Birthdays.

Tuesday, 16 October 2018.

5:05pm

In life, the thing we need most is often the one we do not seek.

No one told me this.

Well, unless you count life experiences as the world telling this to me.

I'm getting emotional today and there is a reason for it. Two of the most memorable things in my life happened today.

First, it is the day that I get to level up. Hehe... if you didn't get that, it means today is my birthday.

Ironic isn't it? Out of the millions of things I have seen in this world and the many more that I have spoken, my birthday is the only thing that I never fail to remember.

And it was not because I have only fond memories of it.

Edna was not very adept at celebrating any kind of festivities. At first I did not see it as an inconvenience as I had never celebrated my last nine birthdays in any flamboyance. In many ways, Edna not mentioning my birthday in the least bit was just a normal occurrence in the Grandeur mansion.

But what worried me was when Roni came about in the equation.

Veronica Grandeur was Edna's daughter and my twelve years younger adoptive sister. At only five years of age she had already looked dead set on inheriting the elegance of her mother. You could say that I was in a predicament of having to live in the same house as Edna in both the elder and younger versions.

But Roni was only synonymous to her mother in looks and DNA.

I suspect, like me, she must have acquired her personality traits from her other parent. Speaking of her other parent, Roni wrote to me yesterday and said she finally tracked down her father. The man had no idea of her existence in even the least bit. She wasn't sure if that was from Edna's selfish ways or his Alzheimer's condition. But I could tell Roni was happy to have met him. She is the kind of person who needs identity in her life and it killed her that she didn't know why she had smooth flowing copper brown hair when Edna's was short and jet black.

Back to Edna's lack of festivity cheer.

Well, she was never around much to be able to share in those celebrations if ever they would occur, which is funny because Roni's birthday and my own are economically joined to be a three day event. Sometimes I like to think that Edna had carefully planned this in her own way. She was always known to be caring in the most unusual of ways. Whatever the case, it made my birthdays worth celebrating every year with Roni's.

She still never came to Roni's birthday parties.

But that is not to mean that Roni never got to celebrate them.

Every year, Roni Grandeur found a new location to celebrate her age increase. The gathering was not all important to the occasion as much as the geographical and building structure. By the time I was sixteen, Roni had already visited Tokyo's, Toronto's, Dubai's and Nairobi's most luxurious hotels.

But even with all this, the excitement that the day usually brought began to wane with every passing city we went to. Roni was starting to realize that of all the people she celebrated her birthday with, I was the only one she could call family. And even I was not related to her by blood. She of course, never said anything about it to her mother. She might have inherited only her mother's looks but they were both stubborn to ever speak their feelings to each other.

Roni was still a child. If these were the same conditions that had created the sweet kiss of sunshine that I call my foster mother, then it was up to me to save the child.