My Dearest Baby Chix,

There are years, and then there are the years that hold you. I remember the world before you in shades of grey; a restless, unmoored existence of glittering parties and conversations that faded as soon as they were spoken. I felt I would drift on forever, seeking, a little wistfully, for some irrecoverable game.

And then you arrived.

It was not a sudden clamor, but a quiet, seismic shift. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then yours was something else entirely—an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person. You smiled, and it was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, a smile that concentrated on me with an irresistible prejudice in my favor.

They say a life can be measured in moments. But with you, it is measured in entire eras. There was the era of whispered secrets on a Tuesday afternoon, the era of laughing in the car when that one song came on, the era of the look you gave me across a crowded room—a silent, sworn pact. These are the moments that hold a grotesque and fantastic beauty, more real than any tangible thing.

So today, on your birthday, I want to give you not just my love, but my belief. Belief in your sad and lovely strength, in the charming discontented way you challenge the world, in the future that waits for you—a future I see as a green light at the end of a dock, an orgastic future that year by year recedes before us, but one we will run faster towards, stretching out our arms farther…

And for me, that future is not an illusion. It's you. It has always been you.

Happy Birthday, my darling. Forever yours.