Spring

Spring is here. You can tell because the trees are blooming again, and a bleary dankness encumbers the simple March air, as if to brace us for the coming of June, July, and August – the implacable months of summer in Texas. Spring always comes the same way in Dallas. I like March, though. March suits me. March in Dallas is a lot like October in Dallas, and both of those months are a lot like the whole year in San Diego, where the weather is always easy. For a few days, if I close my eyes, I can almost imagine that I’m eleven again, braving the shady road home from school with Mario, James, Gilroy and Nathan. So many impossible years have passed since then, and those names have long since lost their faces. Another year has come and gone and brought me back to the cusp of summertime. Nothing about the process has changed.

Last spring, I was in New York City coursing the rainy streets of Manhattan. It was spring break, and most of my friends had departed for this coast or that in search of cheap alcohol and sexual horizons. For different reasons, I chose the concrete paradise of cold New York. I was shopping for agencies actually and a bit prematurely at that - if I’m being honest. Having donned my Dallas “winter-wear”, I remember hoping that I looked like I could have belonged in that city. Retrospect tells me I probably didn’t do a very good job of it in the end. I had no idea what I was doing.

New York was a city of steam in early March – steam from taxis sputtering white exhaust, steam escaping the rusted manholes, steam spilling skyward from hotdog stands and pretzel stands, steam on the not too distant industrial shore of the Hudson. It all reminded me of the time I spent in Boston the February of my junior year in high school. I’ve had the most romantic notion of the East Coast in the winter time ever since then. I’ll wager that was mostly Harvard’s doing. Regardless, that inexhaustible white steam rolling infinitely over the cold, gray sky was and still is a fixture in my fantasy of the eastern United States.

I can’t help it, fix it, or appease it – I think molecules are romantic. Something about them stimulates that annoying reflex inside of me. When the hydrogen bonds in water molecules are vibrating so fast they can’t stay together anymore, they evaporate. When they part ways, they don’t die; they exhale and evanesce into gas, rising ever upward to reenter the cycle. I think adaptability makes things invincible, maybe even immortal. Look at people. Look at the lives we lead. Most of us just keep hollowing our ruts out of the same dirt we were born in, unaware of the minutes and hours and days as they accumulate one by one on top of us. We never get much deeper than six feet before time gets too heavy and we buckle down into those ruts, those beds we make. Too prideful to do anything differently, we resist getting up and walking elsewhere, never realizing that doing so could have made this world remember we were here a while. Meanwhile, flexible water is busy recycling itself, ending and beginning wherever the weight of nature forces it to change, and we just get more and more bitter until finally – SNAP! – we break and die.

My week in Manhattan was perfect, by the way. I did and ate and saw nearly everything I cared to. I visited all the major avenues, Time Square and Broadway, taxied from west side to east, learned I much I prefer the subway as a mode of transportation, made rounds at Union Square and Bryant Park, laughed at tourists standing in line for the ferry to Ellis Island in Battery Park, sipped a frozen hot chocolate at Serendipity, dined off the pre-theatre menu at the Four Seasons then reveled with Tommy in our front row seats at Wicked. I introduced myself to Tom Collichio at Craft, sampled pastries in Little Italy, haggled for candy in China Town, and ice skated in Central Park. Though I didn’t make it to the MOMA, I was able to visit the American Museum of Natural History. Had I known any better at the time, I would almost be embarrassed to admit it now. Nevertheless, I did devour two unforgettable hotdogs on the giant steps of the latter museum. So. Better culture can suck it.

Spring break lasted just a week, of course. It was a fast week – a busy, busy, wonderful week, but a fast one. I had expected that, though - the speed.

Back in Dallas, March was in full swing. I came home with wind-chapped lips and no tan, but with the temperature dancing all around the boundaries of hot and cold and with the sky so clear and blue, I could hardly have noticed. Slowly, the cityscape was opening its eyes onto the remainder of the new year, rubbing away the shadows of winter from the skinny branches of implanted trees, revealing the rebirth that always gives us hope.

One whole year has passed, spring is back, and New York seems lifetimes away. Not only has March come already, it’s gone. I barely speak to Tommy, anymore. I’ve lived on the beach in California. I’ve seen Hawaii. I’m on break from college. I’m moving to Milan in the fall. So much has happened. So much has changed. I’ve changed. All this in one year, and yet, I was surprised and a little heartsick when I walked outside a few weeks ago to find blossoms in all the trees. Time won’t stop for anything, will it?

Today is April first. It’s the beginning of my count down to May first – my birthday. When April ends, I will be twenty-one. Soon after that, spring will end, and summer will begin again. All I can ever remember about summer is draught, the browning yards at S.M.U., the “excessive heat” warnings, the broken AC units, the sweat in streamlets down my back, the condensed, suffocating air, and worrying about the fall. I know what to expect by now. Environmentalists will froth at the mouth the first day the temperature hits 110 degrees. I’ll lay out by the pool on my days off and burn because I’m too impatient to do anything gradually. And then I’ll shed and peel and all my color will flake away and I’ll start over again, secretly pining for the days when it was fashionable for men to powder their faces white. I’ll burn myself more than once on the metal part of a seatbelt. I’ll sweat clean through every shirt I own. And every dusky evening at 9:00 P.M., the sun will set, and news of young athletes dying in practice will buzz with the katydids in the aural periphery of the day, reminding us all that dreams don’t provide good shade from the ferocity of regular existence.

Right now, I understand the year in terms death and rebirth cycles. Depending on my mood, this might mean the same as two cycles of death (summer and winter) and two cycles of preparing for death (spring and fall). I’m admitting this to you. I’m admitting that I have a problem. I can’t stop digging myself into the ground, and I want to get up and walk elsewhere, but I’m terrified of what that could mean. What I really want is to go to a place where time will wait for me to figure out how I ought to live my life, where New York and San Diego and walking home from school with my pals all stay exactly where they are until I've figured out what they mean. These stop-start cycles are spinning me farther and farther away from the beginning of my life. I’ve only just discovered the rearview mirror. Having looked into it, all I can see is the silhouette of my body standing against a giant, orange sun waving goodbye from the horizon.