Or, like a slow hurricane of pollinated asphyxiation for people like your correspondent. Jesus what a nightmare this renaissance business is, this rejuvenation. I can't see it, can't hear it, I suppose I can smell it, though, and I really ought to be able to taste it because those are the two places it goes, delivering its gagging life: my nose and my mouth. This hemisphere of ours leans back towards the sun and the air warms up and dogwoods and all the other trees take notice, stir, send leaves and seed out of their branches. The air becomes drunk with the stuff, saturated. We live for a time in one of those shakeable snow globes except instead of snow it is pollen, and instead of seeing it you only know it's there because of miserable wretches like myself, awake and wheezing at 3 am, awake and wheezing with eyes glued shut at 4, awake and mucous pouring out of my nose when I sit up at 5, eyes again stuck shut, the wheezing not for one moment abating. Awake and wheezing, awake and gasping for air.
It appears as though I'm allergic to spring. So. Actually this is something I've known for some time, it all started when I was 20, but since moving out to the Bay I've forgotten this, there being nothing out there for me to choke on. It all starts with a few straight days of warm weather. Snow, if it's still around, melts. The ground thaws, giving up its goddam beautiful smell, its smell that for the life of me is the second most beautiful thing I've ever known. Crocuses bloom. Young people and old people and middle-aged people everywhere start spending a little more time outside, start smiling a little more easily, start looking around themselves, start lightening up. And then the trees and the bushes bloom, the leaves come out, and all that pollen springs into the air, if our vision were strong enough we would see it glistening green with seed, if our hearing were good enough we would hear it crackle. Zing! Whick! Tsussse! Things! Coming! To Life! Everywhere!
Hurrah, the return of spring!
Hurrah, the return of life!
Hurrah Rejuvenation! Hurrah Hope!
And it's always right around this moment that I start to choke. I gasp I wheeze, it all becomes too much for me, my body seizes itself, I swell and leak. Either I can't take spring or spring can't take me, either way there isn't enough room in the air for the both of us, it seems, the pollen has pushed me out. I go inside, sit in movie theatres or libraries or malls for hours at a time, I close all my windows, I shut all my doors. I will keep all that pollen away, I will keep all that life very far from me, I don't care what it proves, winter's verdant jettisoning is too much for me. At moments, during certain early morning hours when I'm sitting up dripping snot wheezing for 1/3 the oxygen I normally get, at moments like these I think that it is life itself that's too much for me. I think that it is entirely too fitting and discomfitingly allegorical that it is this season, the season of life and rejuvenation, that almost kills me.
As personal allegories are never lost on me. I believe that it's because I'm a writer--or I'm a writer because of it--that I always see the metaphorical in the actual, always read the lesson in the tea leaves of the day's events. Things happen, friends of mine say things, loved ones do or do not, and I think: It is all so obvious. Because I am thinking: If I were writing this in a character, I would write exactly what she said, precisely what he did, I would create the scene--almost to the gesture--of what just happened to me. Everything has a Meaning. We all do things and want things and ruin things because we have Reasons. We are all perfect caricatures of ourselves. If only we'd sit down with a pen and paper for fifteen years inside of 700 different coffee shops, if only we'd look and look.
Of course my body rejects spring, spring is rejuvenation, the earth's and because the earth is the known universe the universe's annual vernal argument against death, against hopelessness. Spring is resilience, spring is bouncing back. Spring is the crocus pushing once again out of the unfrozen land, yellow and white, tiny, the first alive thing in months, spring is this happening not just once, but indeed every year. Spring is, in this sense, its own recurrence. Spring is repetition.
All of which--nice, quaint--I do not believe, none of these I have the innate capacity to yield. I am neither crocus nor the fodder for them. I am a depressive, I have been a depressive all my adult life and even before then, as a child when I would bike to a creek not far away from my house but removed, even then, when I would sit as an eight-year-old and be sullen, and mope. I am a depressive and depressives have no resilience, all is already lost, and if we are lucky/unlucky enough to have ever been given a valuable thing, all is soon to be lost, making, of course, it all that much, the losing having not yet happened. My nickname in 6th grade was Mister Negative, I dropped the block on Joey Eliazarov's foot because there was no hope that day of me being good, no hope at all so I might as well keep being bad, that day was in Kindergarten. I was reduced, by a spilt glass of juice, to tears one night after study hall my freshman year at Choate; everyone was outside having fun but I had to be inside cleaning up the mess, the mess which would take two minutes to clean up if I would just do it, clean it up, which I could not. A fracture begets the fall. Possession begets loss. Love, eventually, begets fear.
Spring with its life begets a choking sound and gasps as my body swells shut, as my body seeks to reject it. It is too much for me. I am autumn clinging always and only to the last leaf. The wind is blowing. The leaf is about to blow. November, with its ten-times decimation, is the most humane month, coming as it does with its certainty. The cold sets in. You can no longer break open the earth. You would be a fool to believe anything will come back. April housing the cruelty. April with its giving what November will take away.
Spring
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
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