You’re fifteen years old! 🎉🎉🎉 Happy birthday, Soren. I hope you have enjoyed the day so far. What did you get? I hope you got everything you wanted. If it will send (sigh), here is my present:
Thank heavens, it worked! I posted it a slightly different way; maybe it must always be that way? Regardless, Mom says she will post it to Flickr, so you can see it there soon too.
I know it is not close to a contemporary portrait — it is referenced from that one nice photo of you and me in front of that one bridge in California, when I believe you were six or seven. I chose it simply because it is a lovely picture, and I have no modern references to work from. It is more a representation of what you have looked like in my own head for the past five years. I am sorry that it is biased.
I have thought little but of you today. I wish I knew why we are denied occasions that were once happy. And you have suffered this longer than I have, perhaps physically (when did Mom even declare that she had no intentions to ever speak to us again?) but certainly in your own memory, for you were younger than I was when it happened.
I wish you the happiest birthday possible, Soren, and hope you got everything you desired. Happy fifteenth birthday. 🎉🎉🎉
With love,
Alice