A Plaque as a Birthday Gift: Anna's Second Trip to Tel Aviv

The first Tel Aviv plaque went up in November 2024, not long after a friend had placed one on her own initiative for the first time — the project was still finding its footing outside Europe, still mostly following wherever I happened to be traveling. Israel already carried weight for me beyond the project itself: it's where I was living through my second loss, at sixteen weeks, in a system where doctors made a different call than the one I'd have gotten elsewhere, prioritizing my safety over trying to save a baby that later analysis elsewhere suggested had been healthy. Placing a plaque there the first time wasn't neutral. It was returning to the place where one of my own numbers had been decided.

So when I went back to Tel Aviv in October 2025, almost a year later, I didn't plan another plaque as a project milestone. I gave it to myself as a birthday gift. That distinction matters more than it might sound like it should. Every other plaque up to that point had a reason attached to it that pointed outward — a city I was visiting anyway, a friend who asked, an anniversary of the project itself. This one had a reason that pointed inward: I wanted to mark my own birthday with something that was entirely mine to give myself, and a second ceramic plaque in a city that already held one difficult memory felt like the right shape for that.

Giving yourself the thing you'd give anyone else

It's a strange kind of permission, deciding that an act of remembrance can also just be a present. I spend a lot of my time thinking about what the project gives to other people — a way to name their numbers, a wall to notice on an ordinary walk, a sticker they can print at home. I don't think about it very often as something I'm allowed to receive from myself. The second Tel Aviv plaque was the first time I let the project be, plainly, a gift to me rather than an offering to a stranger who might stop and read it.

Some anniversaries need a new plaque, not a repeat of the old one.

There's also something specific about doing this in the same city twice, a year apart. The first plaque in Tel Aviv already existed and would go on existing; I wasn't correcting or replacing it. The second one just meant the city now held two markers instead of one, a small compounding of the same fact rather than a bigger, louder version of it. That felt right for a birthday, which is itself a marker that compounds — you don't erase last year's birthday by having this year's, you just add one more to the pile.

I don't know if anyone who finds that second Tel Aviv plaque will ever know it was a birthday gift rather than a planned installation with a schedule behind it. They don't need to. The formula reads the same either way — 5=3, unchanged, unexplained except by the QR code underneath it. But I know, and it changes how I think about the whole project a little: that these plaques don't only have to mark loss publicly. Sometimes they can just mark a year of my own life going on, in a place that already knows what I went through to get here.