Originally a blog post for Amber Kell’s Birthday Bash, 2015
Hello, I am Jack from Just Jack, and I have been asked to share with you my best birthday memory. Now for a guy who is technically over eighty years old, I only really have one memory I can share with you today – what I consider my first birthday.
It might sound strange but I’ve only had one birthday, one that I can remember anyway, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t celebrated on the day I was born. You see just over a year ago I met someone special. I met Leo. For the fifty years before I had felt nothing. I didn’t feel emotion of any kind, no sense of touch or taste, no memories of who I had been. I’d given everything that had made me human away when I became a Jack Frost. But Leo changed all that.
It was Leo’s love that brought me back. I never thought I’d ever meet anyone who could stir feelings from within me, feelings I thought were long gone, but there he was. Sometimes I have flashes of memories. Faces come to me in dreams of people I should know, and yet, I don’t. Maybe one day I’ll remember them properly, remember who they were, maybe even my real birthday and how I’d celebrated it with family and friends. But for now, Leo and this new life is enough.
So my birthday. My first birthday. Or rather the anniversary of the day I could feel Leo’s lips on mine, hug him close and share his warmth. If I’m honest I hadn’t really thought about it, but Leo had. He had woken early that morning, returning to bed with a card, a single cupcake with a single lit candle, and a wrapped gift. It might not seem much, but to me it meant everything that he cared so much about me.
The card was a simple design, Happy Birthday printed on the front in large colourful letters, and what were made to look like chalked balloons and streamers in the background. There was no printed verse inside, just the brief words Leo had written.
To my real boy,
On the day you came in from the cold,
All my love,
Leo
It made me smile.
I blew out the candle, shared the chocolate sponge with Leo, then opened my gift. Wrapped in tissue paper was a keychain and yet again I was smiling this big goofy smile. On the keychain was a plastic model of Pinocchio, the one from the Disney movie, one of Leo’s favourites. When I became human again, he had gotten into this habit of calling me his real boy when we were alone, when we were lying together and he’d stroke his hand over my cheek, seemingly amazed every single time by the warmth of my skin.
It sounds silly I know. But I believe this will always be my best birthday memory. That morning was simple and just the two of us. And that was perfect.
