Birthday wishes
Every friend gets forty near-identical wishes before lunch. The bar for standing out is embarrassingly low: one specific detail and an actual sentence will do it.
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Continue writing opens that message in the card with the words already in it, so all that is left is to change a word and send it. The last message is the longest of the six, and it is the only one you have to copy across yourself.
Happy birthday. Thank you for tolerating me at length and without complaint for more years than either of us wants to count out loud. Have a proper day today, and save me a piece of the cake for later.
Continue writing with message 1Happy birthday. You've been the reliable one in this friendship for years and it hasn't gone unnoticed, even if I've never said so directly. Hope today is loud, late, and full of the right people.
Continue writing with message 2Happy birthday to the friend I can go three months without calling and then pick up mid-sentence with. That's rarer than it sounds, and I don't take it for granted. Have a very good one, and ring me when you're free.
Continue writing with message 3Happy birthday. Another year of you being confidently wrong about films, and I'd have it no other way. Let's do something faintly stupid to mark it, like we're twenty-two and it's a Tuesday afternoon.
Continue writing with message 4Happy birthday. At some point you stopped being just a friend and became the person I ring when something has actually gone wrong. That's a promotion nobody applies for. Have a very good day today.
Continue writing with message 5Happy birthday. Friendships this old don't survive on effort, they survive because both people keep choosing to pick the phone back up, and you've done that for years without ever being asked to. Thank you for it. I hope today is spent with the right people, and I hope this year is a lot kinder than the last.
Skip the wish and go to the friendship. Have a great year is what forty other people have already sent. Naming what the friendship is actually like — the three-month gaps, the arguments about films, the fact that they are always the one who books the table — is what makes it yours.
Do not save it for the group chat. A birthday message in a group is addressed to the group. The whole value of a card is that it is one person writing to one person, and it is the only thing they will still have on the fifteenth.
Forty identical wishes and one sealed envelope. Guess which gets screenshotted.
Write the birthday cardIt arrives as a sealed envelope they open on their phone.