At exactly midnight, my phone buzzed.
“Happy Birthday, bro.”
A simple message. No emojis, no unnecessary embellishments. Just three words from Alex, my younger brother.
I stared at the screen for a moment longer than necessary. Not because I was surprised—though a part of me had been, every year—but because of what this seemingly ordinary text represented.
Years ago, when we were younger, birthdays had been just another day to him. I would stay up every year to be the first to wish him, but it had always been a one-sided effort. He had never reciprocated. Not because he had forgotten, but because he simply hadn’t cared for such things. He hadn’t been the sentimental type, and I had long accepted that.
I didn’t know when that changed. One year, I had received a midnight message. Then the next, and the next. At some point, it had become a quiet ritual—one that neither of us ever acknowledged out loud, but one that continued, unfaltering, year after year.
It had been a small thing, really. A handful of words that had taken less than a few seconds to type. But somehow, they had carried the weight of something more.
Perhaps that was what this was all about. The things we never said, hidden in the things we did. Love, tucked away in the quietest corners of our lives.
Maybe love hadn’t always looked the way I had expected it to. Maybe it hadn’t been grand gestures or perfectly timed celebrations. Maybe, sometimes, love had just been a text at midnight—a quiet reassurance that even when life had pulled us in different directions, even when words had gone unsaid, we had still been thinking of each other.
Perhaps that had been enough. Perhaps that had been what love had looked like, in its simplest, most unspoken form.
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