It’s abrupt. Intrusive.

It never asks if now is a good time or if tomorrow would be better. If you are ready, or not.

Spring.

THE VIOLENCE OF SPRING

You just step outside one day and there are daffodils under your feet, a sky suddenly saturated in cerulean. People are lounging shirtless on the steps of their Brownstones, bare chests starving for sunlight, and you are standing there, trying to catch time as if falls through your fingers.

I don’t know why spring has always seemed to violent to me, only that it has. Only that each year, somewhere within the surreal beauty and outbursting of color, there is a beckoning of sorts. A request from the world to come out of your own winter and be cheerful. And then there are the memories, memories that only the potent red of a poppy or the precise temperature of an afternoon breeze can evoke. It’s a violent affair. Exciting and gorgeous, but startling. The world changes overnight.

I thought I was utterly alone in this sentiment until I read T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow,

I remember reading these lines in a class in college and hearing my peers ask why he chose April as the cruelest month. They, peppy San Diegans as they were, worshipped the sun like a god and could not wrap their minds around the haunting ordeal of spring ever being anything less than heaven itself. And I mean, it is. Of course it is. But I knew exactly what Eliot meant. I knew why April. I knew about memory and desire. I knew about the paradox of winter being warm and the blanket of amnesia that snow offered, long before even witnessing it’s flakes.

MEMORY AND DESIRE

And so it was Eliot that came to mind when I woke up to that warm, still air this morning and watched the sun pour across the room like honey. It was Eliot I thought of when I opened my window to spot the canary yellow of daffodils springing up and out of the earth below. It was the line about mixing memory with desire that floated around in my coffee as I found myself feeling that air and remembering that spring, four years ago now. Back when the pandemic was still just the mere suggestion of a nightmare and not the living manifestation of one. Four years. I couldn’t believe that.

Being in New York this year, it is my first spring away from California, away from the potent memories that sprung up out of the ground each year like clowns jumping out to scare me. And thank god for that. Thank god that I don’t have to walk past my first boyfriend’s house anymore and be knocked over by the fumes emanating from the burning room that we spent that entire spring in. Thank god I don’t have to drive past my high school to get to the beach, trying everything to keep my eyes forward and not careening into the past, into that treacherous well of unfinished stories that was a senior year severed prematurely by a pandemic.

Spring holds all of these stories. I felt the weight of that for a moment.

SPRING IN NEW YORK

But then I stepped outside and found myself thousands of miles from their carcasses. I ran around Brooklyn on a Saturday afternoon, one of the most intoxicating days to be alive in this city, pillaging through antique stores, book stores, I dare you to make these irrefutably ugly shoes cool again stores. I sat by the water and read, peering up periodically just to stare at Manhattan or listen to the conversation two benches over. Hipsters stretched out in hand-crocheted sweaters, drinking their, yes, third wave coffee. I actually started laughing when I heard two guys engage in a heated debate over the flavor profile of the espresso. You can’t make this stuff up.

I walked forever with no destination, falling into that familiar trance of devotion for the world around you that only solitude can bring. You hear everything, see everything. Life swarms around you in balletic fashion and it’s more than enough.

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