I remember my thirtieth birthday. Sometimes, I think it was the start of the road that led me to where I ended up, but to be honest, that’s not true. I think my path had been decided for a long time. I just hadn't been able to frame why I was so dissatisfied with my life until that night.

  Ending my twenties and moving into my thirties felt like some sort of big milestone. Certainly, that's how everyone else seemed to think about it too, and often kept telling me. But while my parents had a house and three kids by the time they were thirty, while most of my friends were also starting to move onto the property ladder, I was still just kinda coasting by. I had no house, I had no significant other, I had a crappy job that paid rubbish and wasn't vital to anyone or anything.

  I knew for some time that something didn't feel right, but I didn't know what it was. I was kinda happy, I guess, but there was something sitting in the back of my brain, or the pit of my stomach, chipping away at the facade of that general feeling of my life. Something that whispered as it worked its way through me, that none of this was right, that none of this was my own. That I had no choice. No options. That I was just going with the flow.

  But it was still just a little thing, I thought that maybe everyone felt like this. Certainly, even my friends with their fancy jobs and bigger paycheques complained about their lives too. So this must be normal, right?

  So I ignored it, pushed it down, looked away. And tonight, I was going to focus on the big 3-0. Tonight was my night, after all.

  I'd booked out a room at my favourite local bar. Invites had been sent for months, I knew how hard it was for people to get time off at short notice, so I wanted to make sure they knew with plenty of time.

  In the week leading up, I was so excited. Work sucked, but it didn't matter, because Saturday night was my big night. My parents weren't able to make it, and my sisters were on holidays, but we'd all do something smaller and more personal once everyone was back in one place. But all my friends would be there.

  I turned up a little early, because the nervous energy building up in me had to get released somehow. What with public transport, I figured I wouldn’t be the only one, but I was the first to arrive. I grabbed a drink from the barman who always smiled at me and asked how I was. I told him it was my birthday, and he wished me a good one, before moving down the bar to the next customer. I went to the back-room area I'd booked out, where they had couches and a personal DJ booth to control the music in the room. I decided to set up a playlist on it while I waited.

  I finished my first drink, looked around, a lengthy playlist now set up and playing. I was still on my own.

  I checked my watch. 9:36pm. It'd been about an hour since the start time of my party. I shrugged it off, and decided to set about putting up some of the birthday decorations I brought. Not many, nothing too crazy, after all, I'm thirty, not a child, I thought. And there was something depressing about the idea of decorating my own birthday party for some reason.

  Eventually, people started coming in, in dribs and drabs. Everyone would say hello and happy birthday, and give me a big hug, and then they’d move on. My friend Alicia, who I’d known for years, sat on a couch with me for a while, telling me all about her latest romantic troubles. We probably spent a half hour talking about it. Except I wasn’t talking. At all.

  I just sat and listened, nodding along at the appropriate points, and when she was done, she looked at me, waiting for some sage advice. I’d never had much luck in love for myself, but I seemed to be the font of advice for her on this kind of subject. I dispensed what I thought, and she acted like it was the most amazing ideas she’d ever heard. She leaned over and hugged me.

  “Thank you so much, Rusty! I don’t know what I’d do without you honestly,” which was true enough, I’d had to do this uncountable times by this point. She made a modicum of small talk and then moved on. I didn’t see her for the rest of the night.

  She never even asked how my own love life was going. If I’d still been seeing George. I hadn’t been, that had fizzled out almost as soon as it started, but not that she asked.

  More came in, more birthday wishes, I smiled and thanked them, appreciatively. I was dancing along, a drink in hand, but after a while, it was sinking in.

  Everyone wished me a happy birthday when they arrived, but no one was actually talking to me. I realised I was starting to feel lonely. At my own birthday party, even in a room crowded with people.

  I tried latching onto to various small groups discussions, laughing at jokes I didn’t really understand, trying to find a way into the conversation, and people acknowledged me, but no one actually talked to me.

  Eventually, I felt weird, desperately attaching myself to other people’s chatting, barely able to contribute myself, and I just kind of drifted. I nursed a drink in hand, watching from the sidelines, or flowing through with the currents of movement, never really finding somewhere to land and settle in.

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  I was in a room full of my friends, but I was completely alone.

  I started thinking this little kernel of an idea, a shimmering, little light of darkness deep inside, like the contrast of black on black. I realised that I wasn’t really important to this. I was just the tool to put it together, to make it happen, to dispense the odd line of dialogue that simply added colour or context, but not meaning.

  Life and joy was happening, but none of it to me. I smiled, I think, but it felt like a mask. Something I was wearing to look normal, to fit in, to hope that someone would come and ask me about me, my life, or anything, really, just someone who was there because they wanted to be with me. Where turning up was about more than just the setting of a social event to mark not so much the aging of me, but that later they could use to note when they last saw everyone.

  “How’s the art going?”

  I turned and saw Greg, a guy who used to date one of my friends a couple years earlier. He kinda hung around since, even after he and Pete broke up. It was amicable, and we all kinda liked Greg, but we didn’t see him often. I didn’t even really remember inviting him, but I suppose I must have.

  “Oh, uh, I don’t really do it anymore,” I answered, raising my voice slightly to be heard over the music and the hubbub around us. “You know, what with AI, it got really tough—”

  “Oh, totally. But you have to keep up with the times, right?” Greg cut me off, smiling as if he totally understood what I was going to say. “You know, we use it a lot in work now, too. Really useful. Really streamlined the process.”

  “Don’t you work at a newspaper?”

  “Sure. It really helps us make punchier headlines, really working with the SEO. Honestly, a godsend. I could never get my head around that shit,” Greg laughed. Laughed.

  “I guess. But like, wasn’t working on that someone’s job? Like, for me, it just got so hard to get seen out there, with so many pieces made by prompts, y’know?”

  “Yeah, it’s amazing! Totally,” he said, bobbing his head along to the music, until he raised his chin acknowledging Pete across the bar. He turned to me and smiled. “I’ll see you soon, it’s your birthday soon, right? Have a great night!” Then he just walked away.

  I stood, flabbergast. It was like I wasn’t really in that conversation. Like it was moving to an inevitable conclusion without me, reading along to a script I wasn’t privy to.

  I’d wanted to be an artist, but I guess the timing was never right for me. I worked hard and produced a ton of great pieces that I loved, but eventually, they were filling my room more than they were anywhere else. I tried to build a name for myself by doing fan art, posting to social media for a while. But the algorithms buried me, and when AI art proliferated that casket was dumped to the bottom of the ocean, weighed down by cinderblocks.

  Gradually, my day job became a bigger focus, even though it wasn’t at all what I ever wanted to do. But you can only hold on to a dream for so long before it starts to feel like a nightmare.

  “Hey, how’re you?”

  I turned towards the voice, and saw this beautiful guy, dark hair and startlingly blue eyes, a gentle smile on his face. I felt my cheeks flush immediately. His name was Vincent, but he tended to go by Vee. I didn’t know him well, just saw him at the same nights out, but I always kinda had a crush on him.

  “Oh, uh, hey Vee. Yeah, good thanks. Great. How’re you?”

  “Ah, you know, same old, same old. Loving life,” he looked around. “It’s a great birthday, huh? People really turned out.”

  I had sent an invite to him, but didn’t recall him replying or saying if he’d be attending. I really had hoped he would. I dunno why, not like I was known for making a move on a guy I liked, but maybe, I thought.

  “Yeah. Yeah, it’s been great. So glad to see everyone could make it,” I replied, smiling back.

  He nodded. Then he leaned in and he asked, “So, uh, do you have any idea who the birthday boy is?”

  I put my empty glass, that I’d been holding onto with no drink in it for what had to be twenty minutes or so, on the bar. I shrugged at Vee, and told him no, I had no idea, and that I had to go and hoped he had a good night.

  I made my way to the exit, and walked out. I left the party in full swing.

  After all, I was surplus to its requirements.

  That night, when I got home, I sat on my bed and looked at the books on my shelves opposite the foot of my bed. Mainly fantasy and science fiction, with a smattering of romance. Great narratives with a hero or at the very least a protagonist who was able to make huge changes to their world or just themselves. With charisma that made it seem like the world revolved around them.

  I thought about myself, and how the world revolved, for sure, but not around me. It felt like I was standing still as the world was speeding by, at breakneck speed, a blur that I could never quite see clearly, that was passing me by.

  I thought about how little I was noticed, and it made me feel insignificant. A tightness formed in my chest, like that day at the Planetarium all those years ago.

  I looked to the stack of video games next to my console, again filled with RPGs and fantasies, and realised they were filled with hundreds of characters, not just the heroes. I wondered if those NPCs, the characters that you didn’t play, that just went around their routines in a perpetual loop, knew that was all their life was, and if so, how it made them feel.

  I realised that I related more to them than I did any of the amazing heroes or characters that we actually play as in those games.

  That was the first night I thought about it. Exiting the narrative. The story that didn’t need me.

  But something held me back. I thought about how awful it would hit my parents. How my sisters would cry, something I hated to see. How some of my friends would be heartbroken. How my flatmate would feel, having to find me, or having to make the rent by themself.

  It was after a few minutes of that that I realised all of these worries were about how it affected other people…not how it affected me.

  I shook it off, deciding my brain was being stupid, one of those weird intrusive thoughts that meant nothing. I lay my head down on the pillow, and told myself I’d feel better tomorrow.

  Still, a tiny fragment lingered, wondering if I’d really be missed at all.