The Birthday Girl

Blew candles. Made wishes. Expected wishes to be fulfilled. Kept waiting. Wait seemed endless. Birthday candles kept getting alighted, kept increasing in number, and wait seemed like infinity.
Birthday girl blew her cake candles and made a wish. She cut the cake in the expectation that this new year in her life would bring in moments she dreamt of. Yes, those moments did arrive. Life seemed a fairy tale. One strike and the dream bubble pricked out the loveliness of this fairy tale.
Another year, yet another set of dreams. Some old ones, some new. Life was seen differently. The span of a year of fulfilled dreams, life-like fairy tales, start and end of an era of illusions and reality, where she grew closer to reality and illusions taught her to be more real; the birthday girl waited, closed her eyes, prayed, wished that this time her wishes be fulfilled, and blew her birthday cake candles with a more mature wish. She was full of hope. She didn’t just wait for wishes to turn real, she started making efforts to build the door of opportunity. Time flew, she grew stronger, maturer and prepared for the other- the less expected. And, as she expected the less expected to not be the one knocking her door, the door of her efforts collapsed.
Birthdays seemed to be the nuclei of her next door to the fulfilment of her dreams. Defeats seemed a little less disheartening and more about a learning experience. She grew with the increasing birthday cake candles. Her dreams, too, kept growing.
Year after year, before blowing her birthday cake candles, she never forgot to make a wish. This was very essential to her. She seemed to bank on her birthday cake candles, inwardly hoping that this time when she opens her eyes after making her wish to blow out the candles, all the darkness that surrounded her would be blown out too. HOPE is what she didn’t lose.
Next birthday, the cake arrived and this time there weren’t any candles on them. She closed her eyes and opened them in the hope to blow the candles out so that her wish be fulfilled. And, when she opened her eyes, she wasn’t the hopeful, expectant birthday girl anymore. All those birthday cake candles had been blown out and now, she didn’t know what to wait for. HOPE changed meaning.