Every birthday marks a new point in time. We’re used to seeing a cake as a symbol of celebration, but to me, it has always resembled a geological cross-section of the Earth. Each layer holds its own story. Just as the Earth’s strata tell the story of our planet, the years we’ve lived shape a person’s story. We don’t start life anew with every birthday. We grow through every experience we’ve lived through. Joy, mistakes, love, fear, victories, disappointments, encounters, and partings—all of this remains within us, becoming another layer of our personality. That is precisely why the face becomes part of the cake. Because a person is not just a single moment in their life, but the sum of all the years they have lived. The candle is the only part of this piece that belongs not to the past, but to the future. It symbolizes the very wish we make on our birthday. It is a small flame at the boundary between two eras—between the life we have lived and the one that is just beginning.