It's my birthday...

So I'll walk into a toy store and say I want THAT 1/24th scale Hawker Hurricane to the owner of the store.
And I will pay with buttons and some two cent pieces I found on the footpath.
And they will accept my payment with good grace
because it is my birthday.
And all the way home I will hold the large box under my arm, making Browning .303 ackackacakackack noises and humming the theme song to the Battle of Britain.
And I will walk up to strangers.
Aged and respectable looking men and women.
And I will tug at their sleeve and glare up at them (kneel to do so if I must, on account of me being six feet tall)
And I will say, "My old man's a bastard cunt."
Something I wish I'd screamed more often while he was alive.
And watch like a silent, twisted dictator as the carefully constructed looks of dignity crumble like cities about me.
And for those who would disagree in my imaginary suburban rampage, I will serve a bop on the nose.
Unless, of course, they intimidate my six foot frame into silence the way that my three foot frame so easily could be, so many birthdays ago.
And I'll sit in the park eating chips and drinking coke from a small glass bottle.
NO!
I'll hang upside down from the rusted, unsafe-looking monkey bars.
Maybe fall from small heights and lay there - winded but triumphant.
For all the falls that didn't kill me.
And I will yell out my love and reverence to my sisters and brothers and heroes and heroines who are always and all so much older than me and always and all so much better looking and funnier and wiser than I could hope to be in a million lifetimes.
And I will walk around - with friends if I can, alone and strange if needs be - on patches of dirt, with two small bottles of water and a twig.
And when I find the trapdoor, I will gingerly lift it with the twig and I will pour the tepid water down the hole and wait for the angry wolf spider or trapdoor spider to come charging out and rearing up
And for that one tense moment its life will be inextricably linked to my own manifest caprice.
Because it is quite dangerous but I am far more dangerous.
Moreso on this birthday than on any other that has gone before.
But you need not worry.
I will not harm or steal, the way we used to.
I'll take nothing
other than your time.
For I have fewer presents now.
Fewer friends and fewer kind words to give or receive.
But too.
I have far less crippling and unwarranted envy of all around.
And this is the birthday present I most desired.

To life.