A return to the still-annual series of the seasons. Seasons are synecdoche, a part meant to stand for a whole. Extant vignettes of an elapsed year. I like to imagine my seasons as containers, though they are borderless. They spill over in my desperation to contain my experiences within demarcations.
My recollections of the seasons are always intertwined with the sensory details of weather and climate, the background to which the foreground of my memories are allowed to exist. I don’t read weather reports aside from the daily highs/lows boasted on my phone lockscreen, but I do enjoy reading other writing about the weather. Weather is a fundamental exercise in describing the natural world, as we have all once experienced it, as it becomes wholly individual to our lives.
In the false spring, I read this about the weather—weather at the center of how we mean anything to ourselves: “to acknowledge how absurd it is that time passes and yet here we are, standing in the middle of it, mixing memory and desire.”
seasons as a sort of symphonic poem.
spring
brisk breeze
Spring presents renewal, resurrection. The folly of hope, bloomed anew. A fascination with spring, in concept—as a vessel, for potential; as a promise, unfulfilled. Wrote poetry, on a Tuesday. I took a writing course, learned craft in the way it was never taught to me. String lights dangling in the foreground, podcast in the background. The myths found me as an urban fantasy. Regency revival as enemies-to-lovers. I pressed produce into pillowy beds of dough and spelled my offerings in focaccia. Painted a falsehood of water lilies; strung tissue paper into peonies.
The late winter moulted into a warmer shape. Tasted wine in the valley, then tore itself out of me. Saw snow, a lake, red sandstone. Scaled a muddy trail, and every so often, I would look back at the miracle of these giant sloped rocks amidst the flurries. Sent myself to a place built to contain a river, broke open on the stylings of tulips and miffy. Chocolate, caramel. Orange life vests drifting on open-water canals, a morning walk on the castle grounds.
summer
heat waves
I commenced, a belated recreation of the real thing. Woke up at five in the morning for a promenade along Mt. Auburn. Dug my high heels in the dirt, black gown fluttering in the breeze. Took a reel of pictures for the family photo album, or the imitation of it. My sparkling patina of achievement, attainment. Maybe this is what it would have felt like when this meant everything. Don’t know when I stopped searching for closure, two years late.
Plucked shells off a sandy beach along the sound. Nantucket nectar, clam chowder. I spent a year sweltering in ten cities, south of the border. Sunk my toes into the burning sand, a twinge of mottled seaweed in the air, let the warm ocean waves crest and fall over my ankles. Multitudes of tacos, churros, tequila cocktails. A car ride that never ended, and also missed a flight for good measure. Worked full days into early evenings, floated in a cenote. World wonders and sacred sanctuaries.
fall
scattered storms
The leaves never change color; but the people do. I found a higher musical plane, akin to religious transformation, but really just Lorde. I listened to the new Taylor album, and everything else that eluded me when sleep escaped. Hot glued dreams onto fabric canvas, priceless. Sad girl soliloquys, polaroid Saturday nights. Sunsets and midnights at twinned peaks.
Obsession curled into me and kept me awake. It reflected the year 2014 back at me through characters in a book series, personhood-defining nostalgia as a funhouse mirror. In a knowing moment of weakness, I watched the dragon show. I read really good writing for the first time in a long while, and I’m still begging for scraps that echo in the same way. Rewired my brain chemistry, called it a homecoming. A return to self; then realized I have always been this person.
winter
hydrologic overlook
A chapter ended two years later, and everything was fine and then it was the last time. I couldn’t count up all the occasions I had walked that twenty-minute commute downhill and ate lunch in the open cafeteria and sequestered myself in my little orange conference room. How many times did it take for that routine to revolve into monotony, then a steady comfort, so I would know and feel its absence when it was taken away? To be confronted with the confused stew of disarray and emerge from an inevitability, an unnegotiable decay.
Winter sprawled across trains, planes, and automobiles. Late afternoons in parks with a floral notebook, pouring out lines of prose until the inky nib scratched to a halt. Train rides that stretched out onwards as the nights grew darker and cast us in shadow. Stirring slowly for the sunrise. Observation carts, snow-caked firs. Donuts by the bookstore. I retreated to a log cabin where a baby blizzard passed by. Hyperfixations ticked by, as a way of fixing whatever was left broken by the past year. Warm beverages, warmer jackets. Maximalist celebrations of the holiday spirit.
Soon, a bejeweled ball will fall over a crowd and karmic balances will reset once more and I will turn a blank page in an old journal. I am sitting at the turn of a new year with such uncertainty, such potential crackling in the firelight.