the first good day

we talk about the weather because everything is about the weather

it’s not quite there yet but what matters is it’s trying

Nothing happens and nothing happens and nothing happens and nothing happens and then one night the new leaves are green in the glare of the streetlight, and the air is friendly when I come up out of the subway late at night. I brace for the punch and it doesn’t arrive. The world is a big house and the house throws open its doors. Here we are again, telling the same story everybody’s already heard: It’s warm out. The good weather is here. It’s spring.

Spring is a practical joke. It’s the rug pulled away, the other shoe dropping, the surprise party waiting for you in the dark of your own house. Even the good things arrive like a jump scare. Two decades ago, I walked home and it was still light out when I got there. It was the first time I had lived through the world turning over at the end of winter, and I wanted to bite all the new leaves along the street, as though it would ever be possible to get close enough to anything.

Years passed and history convulsed, banks failed and bars closed, all kinds of people loved each other and then stopped loving each other. Groups of friends splintered and reformed, we went to parties and then we stopped going to parties and then we went to different parties. We elected a new president, and then, later, another one. We all tried to get better at one thing or another, and mostly failed, and occasionally succeeded. Everybody was wearing one kind of jeans and then everybody was wearing a different kind of jeans and then nobody knew what kind of jeans to wear. Everybody tried to grow their eyebrows back; everybody tried to forgive one another. People I saw every day disappeared into the churn of acquaintance and obligation. People got famous, got married, got pregnant, got divorced, got over one another or never did. Each year, spring came anyway. Despite the warnings and despite the odds, despite the banks and the news and the government and the heartbreaks and the cars and the phones and the headlines, the cold ground turned warm and the flowers pushed their way up into the sunlight. All along the filthy sidewalks, the trees bloomed white and pink and then neon. Petals lined the asphalt and the air smelled like laundry and gasoline. Nothing stops it; every argument fails. Nobody asks to be reborn, and no one can do anything about it.

There’s no holiday that feels more like a holiday than the first day of spring in a big city. It’s not on any calendar; it’s not timed to the equinox, to a long weekend, or to the last day of school. It simply arrives, overnight, with no warning. I walked outside two days ago and, after so many long weeks of dissonance, the sunlight and the temperature had aligned. I felt hideous and unprepared, like that nightmare about showing up to take a test you didn’t study for, which was how I knew it must really be spring. If only I had planned ahead for this, I told myself, just like I tell myself every year. If only this time I had remembered to become a wholly different person before the good weather arrived.

But there’s no way to be prepared for it. The landscape offers nothing until it explodes. Probably the reason I think it’s so beautiful in this city is that mostly it’s ugly; when beauty arrives it’s exaggerated by context, like red text in the middle of a page. I stay in my apartment, but the good weather elbows and shoves its way inside. Even through the scaffolding, even with more than half of it sheared down and clipped away, the tree under my window blooms into thick white exclamation, bursting through plywood and metal. It makes a soft canopy above the trash bags and the rats on the street below. On the first day of spring I would forgive anything; the air that gets in one miserly window smells like forgiveness wide-armed enough to raise up all of history’s beloved dead. No one who ever went outside on a spring afternoon could really believe that there aren’t second acts in everyone’s lives.

It isn’t even beautiful yet, not really. The ground still shows more dirt than flowers, and for every tree covered in blossoms, several still raise bare branches to the sky. But beauty isn’t the point as much as change. Spring is proof that things change, that change is not just possible but inevitable. So often, change is a theoretical topic: Are people good, and can they change? How can I change my life, my habits, my patterns? How long does it take to change, and does it always require suffering, and when will the Duolingo Owl¹, the small angry god of change who lives in my phone, stop being mean to me? But here, on the first spring day, it’s literal and obvious, real as the dirt between the bulbs, real as the grime in the subway cars, real as taking off your coat and wishing you hadn’t worn it at all, real as the band of sweat accumulating between my shirt and my skin as I sit indoors and write this. 

Something actually changes. That’s all miracles are: Something actually changes. I know why it’s good to assume that the people we love won’t change; I know why it’s smart to assume that we, ourselves, won’t change. I know it’s necessary to live within the truth of circumstances, to make plans based on an honest and clear-eyed assessment of ability and weakness, history and likelihood. I know how to be safe because I have been looking at safety all of my life from outside of it, as though peeking into the windows of a house across the street. A small amount of hope is useful and a large amount of hope is dangerous, or at least that’s what I keep trying to learn. I get it. I don’t even mind it most days. I square up to it, I put guardrails in place and make cautious plans. I learn to live not expecting too much, and then one day I walk outside and the world is in technicolor again, and it’s warm instead of cold, and I think why shouldn’t all of us get every single thing we want? Why shouldn’t I expect to beat the odds, and why shouldn’t everyone else expect it? Look at this unlikely world, reaching for the sun.

After dark, the neighborhood is louder and looser than usual. Groups of friends and couples on first dates reel along the block between the bars and the subway, their half-drunk conversations loud enough to be legible in full sentences. Somebody told a secret, somebody quit their job, somebody hooked up with somebody they’ve had a crush on for years. Inside my phone, one more couple posts an anniversary picture. It’s the time of year when I realize that an overwhelming majority of the couples I know all got together in the same six week span between Easter and Memorial Day. The brand-new weather is dangerous in a way that’s about love, and bodies, and long odds. In the warm air, every risk is worth taking, and nobody can come up with a good reason to go home. Why not leave the house, and laugh at the joke, and say yes, and walk instead of taking the subway, and decide that any person you find attractive might look like the rest of your life? Optimism is terrifying, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I wonder if the air conditioner² will still work when we have to turn it on for the first time in six months, and then I decide not to think about it yet.

I go to check if I said any of these exact same things last year, and the year before, and the one before that, and of course I did³. That’s the point: It happens every year. Every year I feel the same feelings, fail to make the same preparations, buy new versions of the same clothing, send the same texts, suggest the same plans, take the same photos and make the same posts with the same captions acknowledging that everybody else also took these same photos and made this same post about it. The miracle is that you aren’t special, and no one is special, and nothing, not even the dead earth turning warm again and vomiting up flowers, is special. It’s boring, and ordinary, like all miracles, and like all miraculous things, it means nothing. Spring will show up whether or not I’m happy, whether or not I’m beautiful, whether or not I prepared for it, whether or not I buy the right clothes. Spring comes even when I fail to adequately love the people I love, even when I miss my deadlines, even when I leave texts unanswered, even when I’m too old, or not a good enough friend or neighbor. It comes whether I get up early or sleep in late, whether I manage my time well or poorly. It comes even if I don’t go outside. There’s nothing to do about it, and no way to earn it.

I do the same thing over and over again, and call it new each time because it is. I take a shower and then I go outside to let my hair dry in the warm air. I walk around with bare legs and no jacket. I don’t feel beautiful, but nobody cares. I sit on a bench. I buy an iced coffee. I say hi to other people’s dogs. The dead come back to life, the resurrection arrives to save the world, and the hot dog carts set up in front of the museum. Sunscreen gets in my eyes. I worry about doing my taxes. I walk back home.

Nothing happens, and none of it matters, and spring is here. The day blazes blue across the sky and holds off the nighttime for hours. The park crowds in toward the streets, bright and eager and ordinary. Nothing is special, and I still don’t have the right clothes for any of it. Under the scaffolding, the green leaves bloom all night long.

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1. I wrote this essay about the Duolingo Owl, and how people change and whether they really do, a couple years ago (how on earth has it been two years?) and I still like it quite a bit. I’ll admit I’ve maintained an unbroken Duolingo streak since a couple months after I published that essay, but that just means the owl haunts me in a different way.

2. Here’s an essay about air-conditioning.

3. I pretty much write a version of this same essay about springtime at this same time every year, but that’s the point, that’s what a holiday is, and what a season is. Here’s last year, and here’s the year before (this one’s nominally an ode to Martinelli’s Sparkling Apple Cider, which means it has a special place in my heart).