Happy birthday

He was fifty and tired in a way sleep did not fix. The birthday had come and gone quietly, and now he sat on the porch with a beer sweating in his hand, watching the light go orange over the yard. He thought about the meetings. The spreadsheets. The younger men in the office who looked at him the way you look at something that's already gone. Thirty years of that. But thirty years also of structure. Of knowing what the day required. Of being needed, even if it was only because someone had to sit in that chair and sign the papers. The job had made a discipline of him. It had kept him from floating away entirely.