I feel guilty because it is as if I have been decaying. As if when you met me I seemed to exude some sort of brilliance and shine but the cold has made my skin crack and peel away to reveal that I am rotting inside. Every year I sink into winter’s grasp and hold out hope, a hope that always feels so futile at the time, that when spring comes the person I was will return. But the sky will only grow grayer and darker. I will only get worse before the springtime comes.
You felt so old and tired at twelve. You wouldn’t believe how young nineteen feels, with so much more left to learn. Nineteen feels like the ugliness of spring. Nineteen feels like a sea of pollen in the air, my classmates’ red noses, the tears they blamed on allergies. Nineteen feels like eczema and itchiness. But it’s spring. While you can’t shake off the cracks that winter has carved into your dry skin, there is the promise of relief yet to come.
The hand up your skirt becomes something you want again. Things happen in spring, a lot of things that you will forget for a while. That warm day in February is spring. Spring is half the year. Spring is always. In the spring of nineteen, I hope you may find what you lost again. Find what was never lost, just delayed.
Did you ever wear that skirt again? When did you realize what it was? Had you ever imagined that you would carry it with you for so long? Wasn’t it spring, that day so long ago when you bashed your head into a glass table, hoping the weight of your thoughts might strain the cracks already there, hoping it might all collapse into a bloody mess?
For every spring treads too close to the heat of summer and then winter comes again. And I’m trying to calculate if I spend more time decaying or regenerating. What’s the cost-benefit analysis of getting better only to get worse again? Maybe this year I’ll stay rotten so I don’t have to go through the loss of forgetting who I am again.
