Thirty feels like a small threshold you step over without noticing until you turn around and see the room differently. Jen’s 30th birthday was all warm light and gold—shimmering fringe on the wall, a little metallic party hat tilted into place, and two coupe glasses held up like punctuation.
There’s something comforting about a simple celebration: a backdrop that catches every stray bit of light, a few friends close enough to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, and the quiet agreement that the moment is worth keeping. The gold made everything feel brighter than it probably was, the way memory does—taking ordinary corners of a room and giving them a soft, glowing edge.
We toasted to the past decade without trying to summarize it, because you can’t. You just notice what’s been built: the friendships that hold, the laughter that comes easier, the steadier sense of self that arrives when you stop racing toward some imagined version of “adult.”
If a birthday is anything, it’s a pause—a brief stillness before the year keeps moving. Jen looked happy, the kind of happy that doesn’t need announcing. Just a smile, a glass raised, and the gold behind her catching the light like it was meant to be there all along.
