on always being the person who remembers birthdays

This is a thing about me that people find charming until they realize it's a compulsion and not a virtue. I remember Neha's birthday (June 14) and her sister's birthday (October 2) and the birthday of a girl I sat next to in class eight for one semester before she moved to Chandigarh and with whom I have had no contact since 2007. I remember the birthdays of three ex-colleagues, a former roommate's mother, and the guy who used to deliver water to my previous office who once mentioned in passing that his birthday was the same day as his daughter's, which I found touching and have remembered both ever since. This is not the impressive thing it sounds like. It costs me nothing to remember. What it costs me is having to decide, every year, whether to send a message to the water delivery man's daughter, who doesn't know I exist, on her birthday in February. I do not send it. But I think about it. What I've noticed is that people who receive my birthday messages are divided into two camps: those who are genuinely touched, and those who are faintly unnerved that I remembered. The latter group wonders what else I remember. The answer is: everything, I'm afraid. The thing you said in 2019 about preferring mangoes to lychees. The name of your childhood cat. The time you cried in a movie theater in Khan Market and tried to pretend you weren't. None of this means I am paying special attention to you. I pay special attention to everyone. This is both a gift and an affliction and I have not yet figured out which it is more of.