How could I be unhappy?
The window is half-open, and the smell of the bare trees and greening grass fills my bedroom. It’s more refreshing and real and lovely than any candle scent ever is. I could never suffocate from this.
The slightest chill in the air, caused by the temperate wind that characterizes the most life-giving days, ripples the faux-lace curtains that frame my bed. I perch in the corner on a seat in my slippers, my remnants of winter.
I open my favorite book to pore over its pictures again. Their beauty still astonishes me. They make me hope for a life that, if you capture any moment of it, would look like those stills. I try to remember what movie character said almost that same thing.
To supplement the chirps of birds I still can’t name, Sav’s Good Weather mix plays quietly from beside me. I wonder who Sav is and if she’s listening to her playlist right now, as I am. I feel like an intruder in her life. I try to picture her. I am seeing spring through her vision. If I knew her, I think we would be friends.
Now, outside, my back is pressed against a stained, brown-orange wood beam of my deck. I imagine the cells in my skin opening up like flowers to the beaming sun. Being under its rays is like being in a poolhouse’s sauna, like being an indoor cat in front of glass doors.
I think about how the most dreaded month of the year suddenly, somehow, turned into a new… favorite time of year. It could be because the earth is getting warmer now, I guess, or it could be because I’ve come to tolerate the melting snow and straw-like blades of grass. Does this 70 degrees in March mean that winters will turn more extreme, or does it mean that winters will move closer to being like spring? I’m not sure which I’d prefer.
Maybe soon, I’ll be somewhere in which every season is the same, anyway. Where it’s 70 degrees year-round, and the oppressive heat becomes another fact of life, just like seasonal fluctuations and fools are what I’m accustomed to here. Where it’s warmer, where nobody has the privilege of their own yard, where concrete, not vegetation, fills the empty space. Maybe that’s where I will be. Someday.
But, it’s safer here. So maybe I’ll stay, try not to compromise. Grateful and good all the same.
I think about how right now, outside, criss-cross applesauce on the deck, feels like it did last year. The wooden pole jabs the vertebrae in the middle of my spine. I try not to crane my neck downward.
It’s all, mostly, the same.
