It is beautiful to live in a city where the seasons are something more than a way to divide the calendar into quarters. Where each of the words: germinate, blossom, wilt, and die belongs to one of the months. You see, April here is green and pink. December is grey and grey again.
I was born a day before the spring. Twenty-five years passed before that meant something. In my hometown, the vernal equinox was just another day among two hundred of heat. Here, it is the day when the days cease being short and the nights long. It is the day when rays of sunlight become less likely to trip in their journeys. They now begin to reach and caress one’s face. It is the day that paints the ceiling of parks green, yellow, and pink. The day in which, somehow, things start over. They reform. They are reborn.
I do not intend to disparage and undersell the beauty of my hometown. The place I called home for the longest time is, in different ways, as beautiful as this place. Like everything, right? Although it now feels more like someone else’s home, I’ve had much to say about that town. A year later, there is still much to learn about this one. Much to understand. Much with which to fall in love.
My life now is very different. I believe my thinking is very much the same, but what surrounds me is not, so my conclusions are inevitably different. I have seen more of the world. Of the planet, yes, but also of that which we call “life”. I know myself much better, but I also trust my knowledge of myself a lot less. What I’ve written here before, which is honest, albeit not vast, is out-of-date. My points of view have changed, and my arguments have expired. Were I to write on the same subjects, the outcome would be much different. But that is how it will stay: wrong, because although that is no longer who I am, it is who I was, and that is as much a part of who I am as the words I write today will make me what I will be (I apologize for this sentence).
In this place, being my own man, I found fears I didn’t know I already had. I face them every single day. They win more than I’m eager to admit. Even worse, there are days that I let them win without much of a fight because I’m tired and I’ve seen this film before, and I was not too fond of the ending. That hurts, but it’s ok because, especially on the days when I let them win, I at least square up to them and look them in the eyes.
In addition to fears, I have come to possess nostalgias, melancholies, longings, and regrets. These are the emotional collections of an adult. What could a child miss when they were still new to the world and were yet to acquire things to be lost? From one day to the next, I morphed from someone who had everything into someone who missed everything. I’m still learning how to live like this. I rather like this part. It makes me feel like I didn’t wholly waste those first twenty-five years. It helped me understand that I’ve survived more than I could remember.
I am sorely ashamed to say that I am more than curious about the opinions others have of me. It matters to me. I try not to ask. It is not my right to know. I just don’t know if I have ever been perceived as someone who is particularly strong. I always thought I was because things would slide or bounce off my thick skin. Horrible things would happen to me, and not many good things would, yet I always felt fine. Just fine. Now I realize this abundance of awful things and lack of good things could not hurt me because I stood in the domain of everything I would ever need, readily within my reach. Here, now, I must always be in search of what I need. Most of the time, I cannot find it. The bad things affect me more and all the time. The good stuff barely, if at all, makes a dent. I no longer believe myself to be strong. Stronger than I was, for sure, but still not as strong as I deluded myself into believing I was. I’m just really stubborn and thick-headed, so I cannot stop moving forward. How lucky, huh?
Now I am furious at myself and incredibly disappointed, but I can’t figure out why. I try to remind myself that I’m lucky to still be standing. That others have it much worse, with real problems, as it were, and yet they are doing a better job of living than I am. I feel less than them because they are better at being better. I’m angry because I feel like I’m failing, and that is something for which I can never forgive myself. I was born broken, but I expect myself to become fixed. Although we’re all clearly very different, I find it impossible to believe that, in that sense, we are not all the same. How could others see life so differently from how I perceive it? How could we all be in the same room, yet only for some are the lights ever on? Is it in any way better to believe that the light is on for all, yet some of us refuse to open our eyes?
I am still afraid of going to sleep. Unlike some years ago, it is no longer the darkness that I fear. There’s nothing in it that could hurt me. I’m just scared of letting my unconscious mind take the wheel. Unlike me, it cannot hide behind the walls I have built. It is vulnerable to every ounce of pain and sensitive to the slightest aggravation. I cannot trust it. It itself aggravates as soon as I let my guard down. That’s what going to sleep is, letting my guard down. It’s when I wake up that, while my guard is still low and before I can bring my fists up, the real monsters come to frighten me.
Not only flowers are reborn in the spring. I found that the person I was was wilting because the summer was turning to fall. It had happened before; it will happen again. From my branches fell the leaves, and, for an extended season, they covered the ground in orange and brown. I undid myself because I had to rebuild myself. Like anything worth anything in this earthly life, it is a process as beautiful and graceful as it is devastating and painful. Although I could see it quite clearly all the time before, now I sometimes cannot recognize the beauty in everything, but the pain itself is evidence that the beauty is in there somewhere. That I can always trust. Those leaves that fell; I didn’t pick back up. They, too, wilted into dust. The vitally green leaves of the spring are never the same brown and crisp leaves of the fall past. They must always be new leaves. We, people, must also be like them. When, after coming undone, we reassemble ourselves, we are no longer the same people. We are also not always better than we were the seasons prior. That is ok.
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