_edited.png)
Trees getting green again, flowers popping up between the cracks in the sidewalk, sky mixing rainstorms like cocktails—the school year is ending, and I’m reminded every day by the tepid, lethargic air. It’s what makes me want to lay in the soft, city grass and shut my eyes so that the lids grow warm with the sun. The year is coming to a close, students are growing lazy with a spring fever that haunts our every action so even picking up a pen strains our muscles like it weighs a dense hundred pounds in our hand. So, in celebration of the end of the Spring 2024 semester (and the future time I’m going to have to actually get back into reading again), I’d like to reflect a bit on the joy I’ve experienced from these past few months.
Cold January wind forms evil fingers wriggling into the folds of my coat, chilling every nook and cranny of clothing that layers on my body, but it’s only for a moment. A walk down Jackson—an old Johnny Cash song (look out Jackson town!) playing in crackling headphones—that nips my nose red and cheeks chapped. Bags laden with heavy Christmas gifts weigh down each of my arms, books stacked on my backpack until I stumble against the gray snow piled on the curb; yet the city is quiet. I can hear myself breathe in the air that freezes in my throat, yet my head is clear. The city is quiet. There’s no one on the street, the buildings turned into crystalline statues, beautiful against an icy skyline. I pause, when I breeze into that city people gonna stoop and bow, and blink my frozen eyelashes, thankful for a frozen breeze and a frozen atmosphere, if only for a moment.
But then—it’s sunny in February, a freak flash of warmth that startles everyone into action outside, throwing frisbees and lounging on picnic blankets and squinting at a torn paperback laying in the winter-crispy grass. We gather our green plastic boxes that barely hinge closed with the sandwiches and fries and bits of slightly undercooked pizza and tofu-something and floppy roasted vegetables to the biggest patch of grass we know of. It’s warm, even after the sun sets early. There’s Jack Johnson's music in the background—make you banana pancakes, pretend that it’s the weekend now—and smiles on our faces, for now we put our heads together for talk and laughter and just a moment of the college you see in movies.
By March, we’re on the train headed North until we hit Wisconsin, or ten minutes from it at least. The woods wait beyond the station and beyond that border, slightly shifting with a sunny breeze that makes the evergreens rustle high above our heads. It’s still brown and grey with winter, yet there is a beauty even in the orange needles that litter the forest floor, in the craggy tree branches which reach out into the trails as if to tap on our shoulder for attention. Breathing feels free and clean, smiling feels natural. We sing Lord Huron (I took a journey to the unknown) and joke and prod one another with a mud-stained elbow and sigh with exhaustion as the trail heads upwards. My legs burn and my horribly lazy lungs heave—but the hills wait for no one, they sit atop those trees and look outward, as we do when we finally reach the top. A skyline of a different kind of skyscraper, one that has leaves instead of windows and limbs not human.
April: a darkening sky and a phase of stardom for the moon, yet it’s not so fantastic as sharing eggs and bacon and hash-browns and coffee and pancakes and OJ in a room with everyone warm and together like a misfit family coming together on Sunday morning. We eat as much as we talk, as much as we swap bites of each other’s meals and ask the waitress for another pot of coffee when the person across from us runs out. Ten o’clock, then eleven, then it’s time to walk out, bellies full as our hearts, into the drizzly street. It smells like wet pavement and happiness, and sounds like the Elmo’s World theme that got somehow stuck in someone’s head like a glue that can’t be released until the song’s been sung twelve dozen times, much to everyone’s chagrin. Even then, the complaints are tainted pink with cheer all the way home.
I await now the month of May, wondering what it holds within its arms. Perhaps more memories made under the guise of a song, or something else that can only be defined in vague colors and feelings. Only time will tell.
