The end (of winter) is nigh

Look, it’s not that I dislike winter, it can be pretty cozy when it wants to be.

However, like my namesake plant, I need light, sunlight to survive. And unlike my namesake plant, I’m not evergreen.

I have severe seasonal affective disorder (appropriately named SAD). So, yesterday, when I saw the first blossom tree where Susa used to live, hope came out of hiding.

Hope, for me, is a little feathered thing, aeons old, and only really growing weaker, but the sight of those flowers, pink, delicate, sugary sweet, promising sweet-sour sticky cherries to pick with special people in the summer, it’s almost like it blew on the embers, lighting some tiny flame.

Now, spring isn’t the happiest of seasons, it brings a lot of grief, but it’s still that little pebble path that leads the way to the fields of knee-high grass that I love about summer. But what that blossom tree meant to me, was that the worst of the darkness was over.

It was the same thing I felt at Midwinter. Except then I was watching the sun set at four pm while refilling the mangers and dreading the next hour of work in the dark.

Last night, I was coming back from training, my hair was drying on my head, and my limbs were heavy. And it was there like fate, under a flickering streetlight, right where Susa used to live.

And I’m always wishing my life away, counting down until this, until that. And I find myself doing it again, counting down the days until I don’t have to spend all my free time in the dark. I’ve been sick of going to and coming home from school in the dark, but that might be over soon.

Right now, I watch the sun rise and set on my bus ride home, but soon, I’ll be watching it while I study, while I shower, when I wake up. The sun is the love of my life.

The devil couldn’t reach me so he turned me from a plant into a human.

Winter may be a romantic season, but summer carries the spontaneity that I want deep within me. Summer is a long while away yet, but the flowers are soon coming, the grass will be sweeter in the mornings ( sorry, that makes it sound like I eat grass. I’m not strange enough for that) a sunny day won’t feel like a false promise anymore. Good god, I can’t wait.