My whole being is ready for it. My large, goofy glasses and raised brows, my palms firmly pressing the pink table cloth, and my eyes spotlighting the celebration of berries and custard: all are poised to pounce and devour. My mouth is no doubt saturating with saliva. I can smell the sweet confectioner’s sugar, and I can feel the heat of the candle warming the tip of my nose. I see my ten-year-old self, and I am happy for her – even jealous of her self-indulgent birth- day exuberance. I miss her, oddly, in the way one might miss a long-gone friend. Not one who has passed away, but one who left the country back in the fourth grade, never to be heard from again.

My mother’s hand cradles my cheek and chin, as the other one clasps the back of my head. Her fingers are probably laced through my hair. She is so in love with me in this moment – so proud, and eager to please me. I can’t help willing the faceless photographer to move the camera over to the left, just the tiniest bit, to give me a better view of her expression. Surely, she is smiling just as broadly as I am, if not more so. She craves my attention and affection, just as I crave my first bite. She wants so badly to kiss me, to hold me, to keep me right there with her, inside the walls of this photograph.

I feel the stiffness in my neck as I refuse to turn and look at her. I only have eyes for my berry pie from the Italian restaurant downstairs. I love no other, and I am not ashamed. I can trace the love triangle, a line of desire from her to me, and from me to my dessert. She tells me I was in that stage when people stopped calling me “Velcro”; I was still her baby, but no longer wanted to be. I wasn’t selfish – just self-absorbed at times like this one, when everything I wanted in the world was before me in a graham cracker crust. It’s almost unbearable now, eleven years later, to watch myself avoid her kiss. Maybe after the camera’s flash subsided, I turned and thanked her many times over for always giving me exactly what my little girl longings craved. I hope so, but in this small bit of evidence that I have in my hands, I can only see gluttonous, young, childish, me. I can forgive my former self for her rudeness, but only because she is just so happy; I’d hate to interrupt the moment to scold her.

As I wander through the frozen world of this celebration, a less cheerful feeling taps on my consciousness. It nags at my faint memory of this day, and taints the Rockwellian bliss of my 10th birthday party. I search the scene for the source, as if it were a ghostly aura hiding among the objects and figures, whispering to me from behind my chair. There. There it is, hovering in the hollow square hole next to the pieces of my grandfather’s grey suit. It’s unnoticeable at first, but there nonetheless. Aside from the faint outline of my mother’s teapot collection, it is a dark, empty nothingness: an almost poignant bit of pause hidden behind the action that probably strikes no one else but me. That space has a barren melancholy; it is the hallway outside the dining room in the home I no longer live in, behind the Grandfather I no longer have. He didn’t like to have his face in pictures, which is why we have so few. And of course, no one thinks to take pictures of the home they grew up in; it only appears in the background, as dead and gone as any person you’ll never see again. I suppose the sadness of photographs often lies in the negative space – especially when it softly lingers behind the happiest moments of all.