Thoughts on springtime
A little piece written outside in the sun about how much I love being outside smiling in the sun.
I love springtime.
The rebirth, the smells, the sun.
One of the benefits of the south is ease in which she comes, it’s never quite winter but your body still reels from the constant drear, but when spring rears her head she casts the most gorgeous glow on everything. She smells and sings her way into the season, an early bird to the party happily carrying in May’s flowers to excuse her from showing up too soon.
It’s been a long year of fearing change, of the worry found in things that are different, in the begging for things to be okay. As graduation tip-toes its way nearer and nearer I am finally feeling ready for it to come, greeting her presence with an understood respect rather than a latent desire to run.
What's so beautiful about her is that spring always feels like something new, emblematic of these confounding ideals of nostalgia and excitement. It's like when you see somebody you dated briefly in high school for the first time in years, remembering how fond and innocent and sweet love could be and the understanding that this one person is now someone entirely fully new.
I was sitting around with some friends recently, and we were laughing about how just beautiful springtime feels. About how every year we think we know what it feels like to exist in our bodies, what "good” feels like in our brains in our bones.
And then comes the first really nice day of spring.
The kind of day where you can hear the birds above you and the green looks greener than you've ever seen it and the sky stretches on for miles touched by soft and fluffy cotton candy clouds and you have this weird moment of recognizing that you haven't felt this kind of good in so long.
Without diagnosing everyone with whatever pathological psychiatric term we want to use for it, I do find so much comfort in this collective recognition of how long and cold winter can be, and how good it feels for it to be gone. There's something beautiful in how much all of us are feeling, and how we're feeling it all together, something special in how truly the same we all are. That despite our unavoidable differences, there are an infinite number of human things that all of us feel and experience together, that despite the anger and the confusion and the differences between us, every single person can find the joy in springtime with a smile on their face and has the desire to sit outside on a lawn chair on the first really nice day of spring.