Springtime, This Year

Sunlight, tulips and just some thoughts from me to you...

Since the clocks changed, the hour of my waking (yes! my waking!) aligns exactly with the appearance of a windowpane square of light on the wall in the corner of my bedroom. It comes in through the east facing window, and rests there next to the north facing window, warming the plaster, and the already warm corner pipe that hisses and sputters, and the curtains too. I lie in bed and look at this square of sun—sometimes white, sometimes honey—and I think, it’s only right that I stay right here.

The temperature is so perfect when I’ve slept with my window open, and the breeze comes in. The air smells preposterously good—like cold tap water that you gulp up, bent over the bathroom sink in the summertime. Maybe between the spring and the summer, the good smell in the air transmutes itself into a good taste in the water.

I noticed a wind chime the other morning while lying in my cocoon. Crisp, peaked white sheets is what it feels like when I close my eyes. But of course, my duvet is green, and my sheets have little flowers on them. I don’t know where the wind chime is, but I hear it now, and it makes me want to cry. I’m going to get one for my fire escape so that whoever is out there with their wind chime can hear mine too and maybe feel like crying.

---

The urge to stay in bed is both in keeping and at odds with my more general feelings about the springtime—my feelings this year at least, this week at least. But I don’t stay. I do get out—have every day. I fill myself up like a gas tank with the honestly-sometimes-gasoline-colored light from that square on my wall, abandon my sense that I really should be brought breakfast in bed, and heave myself out into the world.

I go around thinking and talking all day about quitting my job, but isn’t that what everyone does on the first seventy-degree day in March? I wonder like I do every year at this time, where all these people go in January and February. It’s not an original thought, so I only mention it here because it’s so powerful. Where have they been?! Wherever it is, they’re back from there, and if I can be frank for just a moment, they all want to have sex with each other.

---

Who could blame them? Is there anything more sensual than the coming of spring? Is there anything more sensual than even just a single individual flower? Just to think of it…

The sexiest poem of all time (maybe) is “Putting in the Seed” by Robert Frost.

poets.org

---

I bought some tulips the other day, and for one, two, three days, they didn’t open. I kept thinking in my head I don’t yet know what color my tulips will be, I don’t yet know what color they will be…

When I was little, I used to play a game with my grandmother, my Baba, when we walked on Park Avenue in the early spring months. We would stand in at the median holding hands and look at the stems with their green, golden heads, and we would guess what color the petals might come out to be. Pink or yellow or maybe orange. Orange was very rare, but we always thought it could maybe be the year this year.

I forgot our game until a few years ago when I found myself on Park Avenue at just the right time to have no idea what color the tulips will be, and it made me remember. It is truly a wild thing that the lightest green of a tulip bud—a color that feels like it should be see through—can conceal the riot that ultimately springs forth, whether it’s pink or yellow or orange (or any of the other colors, like red or purple, that the Park Avenue tulips never are).

Have the bulbs shot their stalks yet? I haven’t been uptown, but no, it’s too early. March 14th is a dangerous date to become excited about the spring. I thought my tulips, the ones I bought at the store, would be orange. My lover said yellow. They turned out to be a color that I don’t have a word for, somewhere between yellow and orange. They are beautiful and sensual, and every time I look at them, well…

I suppose that lately I just feel as though I am trying to be born, and I am slightly afraid, but not too afraid. I feel as though I am trying to be born, and that soon, I will be.

---