By Madeleine Parsons.
Birthdays make room for hyperbole. Lee wants to use M’s as an excuse to write something worthy of the feelings she’s been harboring for her: Thank you for being the brightest star in my solar system. But when she considered tracing those words on the blank inside of the card before her, they sounded too familiar. Lee googled to see if that particular phrasing had already been Hallmarked, and it turns out, no. It turns out, the brightest star in the solar system is the sun. She thinks she knew that, but the syntax swayed her toward star.
Hyperbole is, of course, not supposed to be taken literally. And M is, quite literally, Lee’s last thought when she falls asleep. And her first when she awakes. And it’s problematic because the time between the two has waned in the seven months since Lee met her. When Lee had first confessed these feelings to a friend, her friend had tried to comfort her: It’s not love, it’s lack of information. Infatuation. Since she falls asleep next to someone else, wakes up next to someone else; that’s a good thing to remember.
But instead of absorbing that advice, Lee has begun to romanticize infatuation, thinking maybe she should write a birthday card about lack: Thank you for being enough of an outline to dump the entire zip code of my desire and unfilled longing within your border.
A card of everything she doesn’t know: I don’t know what you’ll look like when I disappoint you. Or the sound you make when you come. I don’t know the pressure behind your fingertips, but I want to, so bad.
I don’t know the first time you felt shame, how hard it hit you behind the knees and in the gut. Don’t know how it hits today—where you run to hide it. Or the ridgeline of your teeth against the tip of my tongue. Don’t know if the bones behind your ears protrude, like mine do. Or if you close the door when you’re throwing up—if you’ll let me hold your hair back.
I don’t know if you make the bed like a semicolon or a period. If you’ll refill my water glass before I have to ask or how soft you’ll scramble our eggs. When you hurt me, I don’t know how your body apologizes.
It’s hard to disentangle what she’s already imagined from the information she lacks, what she knows from what she wants to know. Lee knows M’s allergic to her brother’s cat and feeds it anyway, when he’s out of town. They share a cardigan and a set of keys and M rolls her eyes when she talks about him. But Lee doesn’t know what they’re like together, what roles they inhabit; how their conversations lilt.
She has gathered information like stones. Discreetly slipping facts and feelings into her pockets so that one day they’ll be so heavy she’ll have no choice but to pull them out into her palms, bringing them to M hoping she’s been saving stones too.
Biting on the end of her pen, Lee wonders if this is what it feels like to lose your mind? Inside hers, sanity is packing a suitcase. She leaves the card unwritten in hopes of forgetting its porcelain accusation—reminds herself that it was, in fact, her overactive imagination which her friend had blamed for the all-consuming nature of this “infatuation.” That claim had made more sense in the moment than she would’ve liked to admit.
In childhood, Lee hadn’t limited herself to a single imaginary friend. She’d had an entire family of pink ducks. The five of them were a unified flock until it was time for transition: ONE OF THE DUCKS IS NOT IN THE CAR YET, WE CAN’T LEAVE HIM! WAIT! ANOTHER DUCK WENT OUT THE WINDOW, WE CANNOT LEAVE HIM! I’M CALLING HIM BACK!
Lee’s poor mother. Imagine—trying to get anything done. Imagine—trying to back out the driveway.
Brushing her teeth later that night, Lee thinks to herself that sometimes an over-exaggeration is merely a description. And it is not description but definition which distinguishes the sun from a star. But even so, it seems that mapping the boundaries of reality should be plausible; at least loosely, at least half-heartedly. She is an adult, after all, and in adulthood she would like to distinguish love from lack.
Before crawling into bed beside her sleeping partner she writes happy birthday, love lee in the card’s white emptiness. On the cliff of dreaming, she recognizes the metallic lullaby in her mouth to have been sung by her tongue against the envelope’s edge.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Madeleine Parsons is a writer who spends much of her time preoccupied with objects: she has worked in New York’s collectible design world as an art director and interior designer for ten years. She holds an MFA from Hunter College and is a 2026/2027 FIELDNOTES fellow.
