explaining things in too much detail

Fall

I feel August’s arrival in trivial things – I recognize it so easily. The air isn’t a warm embrace anymore; it’s like meeting an acquaintance or a distant family member that tells me how different I am since the last time they saw me. I am bigger and smarter but you would not know that. The stains of July’s wavering sun make me almost unrecognizable. Now, I’m preparing for something to begin and although I don’t know what it is yet I know there is lots of preparing to be done. There is a sense that by this time next year, I will have learned something new. I spent my adolescence associating August with the start of school, with anxiety, and with change. After months of nonconformity and structureless days, my body became untrained to wake up to the sound of an alarm. In my case and for most of middle school, to the sound of Heart Attack by One Direction. So perhaps I should have understood why my mom wanted me to set my alarm for 6:45 in the morning as “practice” a week before school started again. This is the preparation I protested. The first day of school outfit was picked days in advance – it was always brand new. In the weeks leading up we went shopping for new notebooks, new planners, a new backpack, new pens. I had pens and a decent backpack but it was August and everything had to be new. I rebranded myself every fall. Of course I look different since the last time you saw me.

My last first day of school came and went, and then I graduated. Now I’m older and there are no notebooks to be bought and no rebranding to be done and no outfits to be laid out. But if I am quiet and listen very closely, I can hear everything I became and everything I was given. I can hear the alarm go off for the first time in a while. It is the sound of a circuit being made by everything I felt before and everything I feel now. It is August, it is September, it is October, and there is no preparing to be done. But you still will not recognize me and that is okay, I am still evolving as this time passes, it is just less of a tiresome effort. I can sink comfortably into the version of my existence that came when fall’s arrival did not ask me to change. It is visceral now. It is the only movement that makes sense. And although I miss what I was in these years, what a privilege it is to yearn for my old selves.

Winter

I lived in Colorado for fifteen years and anyone who has lived in Colorado for even a short amount of time can confirm that December is actually not the snowiest month. I live elsewhere now, somewhere much warmer, and my friend told me she wants to visit Colorado to see the snow. You know, I said, if you want to see snow, you should go in February. I felt so wise and seasoned telling her this. Like the prize I got for my residency was this useless piece of information that I can pass on to others who otherwise would not have known that sometimes it even snows on Mother’s day. I always said that I hated the snow. What I meant, what I should have said, is that I hated waking up twenty minutes earlier to scrape ice off my windshield. I hated wearing three coats to school and having to lug them around the whole day. I hated the lack of warmth. I hated winter and how out of place I felt. I hated it because I was stuck there. I don’t say I hate the snow anymore; I’ve made my amends.

But winter is still winter in the absence of snow. My body knows how cyclical everything is, that no logic or sensible fact that I can convince myself of can fight off sensation. There’s a recognition I feel in the winter. A pull to a place that is cold and tired and heavy. I know that soap does not replace perfume but it’s winter and I don’t have the energy for both. My showers are hot and my skin turns red quickly under its pressure. The soap lathers and turns to milky white as it moves down my arms, my legs, where it appears almost thinner than water. I think it’s coconut scented, but it just smells like cleanliness. It doesn’t linger, it dissipates into the steam that sits between me and my mirror. My eyelids are heavy, and although my skin is still warm from the water, I reach for a sweater that is too big, and I say I am running late but I am actually not coming. I haven’t washed my hair in a few days; greasy roots and dry ends. And while I don’t put on perfume, I rub too many drops of lavender oil into my freshly-cleansed skin. In the winter, we crave something warm to crawl into bed with. A big bowl of soup. Heat hitting our faces through the car vents. The burns on our tongues that stay for too long from something that was too hot. It is December and it hasn’t snowed much yet and I am very tired. There is no part of me that feels illuminated. It’s not sad, it’s just winter, and we are all very tired.

Spring

A day that had come many times before and weighed nothing but air was suddenly given a new meaning. That’s all birthdays are, a new way to remember a random day in the year. I was born around noon, I only know this because I once asked my mom so I could read my birth chart. Sometimes this day overwhelms me; birthdays are harsh reminders of the passage of time and that’s often hard to digest. I shed tears just as I did as a newborn. I revert back to my younger and more clueless self and try not to lash out the way a child would. I learned that this is somewhat of a universal experience. I think it is a part of girlhood, crying on your birthday, and even knowing a week in advance that you are going to cry on your birthday feels fundamentally female. I never truly feel older on my birthdays and I don’t think anyone ever does, but I do feel different in the days following. As if quietly and swiftly, I’ve morphed into a version of myself that is well-rested and well-fed for the first time in a while. The air does not sting anymore, the tears have dried, it feels like coming home. And today I’ll put on perfume.

In the nature of spring I learned how to digest these feelings. I used to pick at them, spread them around on a plate with my fork to make it look like I’ve eaten more than I have, then dump the rest out when I’m full. I was scared of overeating – scared of feeling something that I didn’t know what to do with because it’s always the things I can’t understand that consume me entirely. But when it’s familiar, it’s palatable. I don’t pick around these feelings anymore, I know how to deal with the nausea. In the spring, I grow. I expand through the surface that I’d been resting under in the months prior. I can exist here. I know what has been felt in the past and I know what I will feel in the future and I know these feelings will vary in the way they move me, that is all I have to know. It is the perfect amount of wilt and light and temperature and water that will bring me to myself. That will nourish me in the way that sleep and love do. These months leading up to Spring are weary and consuming, but when I arrive here, I know there is no more work to be done. Nineteen turns into twenty and then twenty-one and soon it will be twenty-four, and I have nothing left to do except belong to myself. 

Summer

This place does not know me. It does not see the normalcy and regularity that encompasses my whole being. It doesn’t know me on a Monday or Tuesday or at three in the afternoon or in January. It doesn’t know what’s hanging in my closet and what’s waiting for me when I return home and what groceries I need to buy and whether my bed was made before I left or not. But whoever I am in this place does not need to be known in such profundity. She doesn’t stick around in this place nor would she be allowed to for very long anyways. There’s an understanding in the summer that everything is transient – it’s sickening. There is only a very brief moment to exist here, to feel its weight and heat that can’t be kicked off like a blanket and find comfort in the inevitable suffocation. I was, for too many years of my life, under the impression that summer’s arrival meant an abundance of time. It was time to unzip my skin and step out of it completely, as if it was a winter coat, and hang it gently in a closet that would not be opened until this time passed. It always felt like it was over before it started – my memories were cloudy and warped even when I was standing right next to them. Summer separated me from myself. And it was too hot to close the door to the room where I might zip myself back up.

I was fifteen when I stayed at this hotel for the first time. My dad took me on vacation here the summer going into my sophomore year of high school. The hotel sat right on the gulf coast of Florida. It was round and distinguishingly white and it had a rooftop restaurant that slowly spun – they named this restaurant Spinners. There was another restaurant on the beachfront patio called Bongo’s. My dad bought me virgin piña coloda’s here and we spent entire days sitting on the beach. I absorbed the warmth of the sun, I felt sand in between the sheets when I slept, I watched shark week with my dad when the sun went down, I got burnt on the first day. I was young and existing in a place that was not my home but I wanted it to be so bad. This place jingled its keys in my face and then yanked them away when I lifted my arm. We ate at Spinners and pointed at each new sight that appeared out of the windows as we slowly circled the room. We stayed five days, then it ended. What happened during the summers that followed this one were hardly different: I stayed at this hotel four times. Again with my dad, then with my dad and sister a few times, then with my mom as a high school graduation gift. This place crossed my mind everyday in between these summers. It was only after I moved here, after this hotel became a three-hour drive away from my apartment, that I realized how badly I needed to preserve these memories. They are hazy and imperfect and they could have happened yesterday. I don’t want to go back and taint what I remember from this place; I don’t want to replace them with something less significant. This place did not know me or the mundaneness of my actual life or all the rebranding that was about to happen. I did not know this place either. I have realized that summer will always be estranged. And although I will always return to myself, to my skin, I long for the feeling of not being known in a place that does not want to know me.