spring, verging on summer
numbness, yearning, open windows
A year ago, I wrote an article about springtime that I never posted. I don’t know why— I think I was still in a phase of being precious and perfectionistic about Substack. I sat on it and made minute edits until it was suddenly summer and the piece was irrelevant. Anyways, I still read the little snippet to a couple of people and it prompted what I felt was undue concern for my well-being. I said It’s not supposed to be depressing at all. It’s sardonic. Think of Daria, mom.
Reading it a year later, I kind of get it— this is a step beyond disaffected sarcasm. I am not as detached from my ‘art’ as I would like to think.
Reading it a year later, I am a very different person. I want you to see the first copy and I want to write a second version, one that feels truer to where spring finds me this year. I am such a huge proponent of revision. Much has changed, and the internet is nothing if not the world’s best time capsule. I hope you enjoy.
April 15, 2023
There’s something extremely weird about being numb in the springtime.
Let me set the scene. It’s early April, with sun and promising ten-degree weather. There is an actual literal garbage patch outside your window because there was an ice storm last week, and the falling tree branches tore into your bags like a family of raccoons. Finals are in two weeks, so you are stressed, but not the motivating kind, just the kind that makes you bite your nails nonstop. You have to move soon, so you are collecting cardboard boxes and calling moving companies who leave you on hold like it’s a hobby. There is a substantial population of ants taking residence in a bottom cupboard of your upstairs kitchen. The pharmacy is selling discount Easter candy.
This is the season of suffocating apathy. You have a plane ticket for 33 days from now, and you are trying to survive the upcoming three-week hell of exams, McGill déménagement and unmedicated illness while the sunlight taunts you.
Here are some favs of the season:
Miso butter pasta. Use the NYTimes recipe— it’s pretty incredible. No sides accompany this meal because I have zero other groceries. Eat it watching Trixie and Katya on YouTube and hating yourself for not being a work machine.
Toggling between tabs on the computer. I like to go between Quizlet, Notion, Substack, whatever poem I’m working on, and whatever essay I’m stressing about. This is the perfect way to fill many hours at the law library without actually doing anything.
Hip bones. Early spring is for low-waisted jeans and a cute little tank top, to best display that sickening lower stomach region. It’s also fun convincing yourself that being the hottest at the library is as good as nailing your finals. Other honourable mentions include defined shoulders (because you’ve kind of been hitting the gym) and extremely hard nipples (because you don’t understand transitional weather outfits).
The new boygenius album, Lana Del Rey and Alice Phoebe Lou. I took ages trying to paste the links into Substack, unaware that Apple Music is incompatible with the platform. Forget it.
A lychee Allo bar, the kind that got recalled for containing rat piss. Also, coughing up massive gobs of phlegm. I previously said no more vapes, because it’s an embarrassing unsexy habit. However, I can’t chain smoke in my room anymore because it spills out of our upstairs neighbour’s shower. Pretty sure the depanneur by my house sells some that are 50nic (very delicious, minorly illegal). They haunt my dreams.
Twitter drafts. You are busy crafting the unreleased, letting ideas foment in the fertile dirt of a drafts folder. These weeks are for hesitancy, and refusing to make jokes in case they’re not funny.
Emailing a therapist you left on delivered in December. Sometimes a season shift reveals that what was masquerading as poor seasonal affect might be an Enduring Problem. Poor mental health usually dissipates along with school, but this is starting to look like a recurring issue. Learn that you can’t just hit the same familiar wall and call it tradition.
Springtime is fun because it is poised on the brink of summer’s upcoming absolution. The stalemate of spring means my improvement efforts are postponed; I let things rot because I know there are only 33 days until life will be certifiably better, and thus, I will too. Spring is presumably about growth and rebirth, but it’s a waiting room for summer, the real season of prospective renewal, because four empty months can’t help but feel ripe with possibility. Every year, I start listing the books that have been collecting dust on my shelf all schoolyear, preparing deep cleaning projects, saving internet workout plans. I am ready to sell clothes, cut hair, explore, return a revised version of this mortal coil come September. In visions, I am unburdened, made untouchably different by a force of nature that won’t bend to my will any other time of year.
I think the impossibility of this fantasy is tied to the fact that it involves a protagonist who is verifiably not me. Change comes upon a girl who is willing to buy new clothes, indulge a fresh haircut, who travels on days off work and is not obsessed with repetition. Spring is for longing and yearning for a summer that will arrive without fanfare and change nothing.
April 15th, 2024
There’s something strange about the yearning of spring.
Let me set the scene. It’s early April, and last week’s final snow is defrosting into a mix of careful sun and occasional downpour. The warming city is vacillating—spring is not a defined season but a switchboard. And, likewise, I alternate between modes: laying on the grass as if it’s August and I’m happily jobless, sitting in a dark corner on the top floor of the library, head in my hands, flashcards open and blinking on my busted Macbook. The eclipse comes, and people flood the fields like a music concert, like a cosmic Woodstock. We watch and cheer as the light is stolen and returned, as a cold wind sweeps the greying grass and the sun slivers back through our glasses. Then we towel off our bare, dirty feet and head back inside. Like everything, it’s a transitional period, where two lives intersect and overlap. I live in the present and I dream of the future, enacting it in small hopeful glimpses.
This duality is afforded because only some things are changing, exciting ones. I do not have to move again—each day I stand on a street corner and look at the sky and let the relief wash over me, the absence of Facebook Marketplace saves and landlord message notifications. I refuse to take it for granted, the peace of this apartment being mine again, warts and all. Home base secured, I research road trip destinations instead, make lists of how I will occupy my upcoming weekends in this city. The most beautiful street in the world is somewhere in Old Port and I plan to find it.
Here are some favs of the season:
Pasta with arugula pesto, green peas and feta. Justine Dorion has a leash around my neck and when she tugs, I go along. You would think that blanching arugula would make for a weird, peppery mush, but you would be wrong—it’s awesome. The grocery store near my apartment has the cheapest produce and I have started putting fresh herbs in everything I cook. Honorable mentions include: Plums. Rotisserie chicken. Green olives. Fresh bread. Lemon bars.
Writing fiction and having an editor. Part of the reason for my Substack hiatus has been my new endeavour into fiction. Poetry is still in (you can read 3 of my poems in the upcoming edition of Soliloquies), but fiction even moreso. I’ve been reading novels and indulging a modernist obsession with syntactical style and spatial form. Dreamscapes, spirals, stream-of-consciousness narrative. Maximalism and minimalism. Contrast which demands space to unfurl.1
Grown out hair. I haven’t cut my hair since December, and remnants of a shag are the only thing saving me from looking homeschooled or cultish. I am debating a chop for practicality purposes, but something compels me to the mane—likely a mix of contrarianism (everyone has a bob these days) and insistent self-sufficiency (several YouTube searches have convinced me that if a haircut is in order, I should be capable of executing it myself with kitchen scissors and a dream). Also, the grown-out hair is not limited to the head. Dare I say…. full bush?
Jazz and soundscape-y music. Puma Blue, Connan Mockasin, Mac Demarco demos and related acts. I’ve also been stealing my roommate Naomi’s swag and listening to Mulatu Astatke and Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru. 1972 Ethiopian Jazz is where it’s at.
Marlboros. I went to New York and bought myself a classic American treat: a pack of Marlboros in their original packaging. That sexy, slim red box is sitting on my dresser right now. Unfortunately, this has led to the irreversible discovery that Marlboros are objectively the most enjoyable kind of cigarettes (especially compared to Pall Malls, which are essentially topsoil in a little paper filter). This is terrible news because in Canada they’re called Modelos and they are surely $20 for the small box.
Being kicked off the family Netflix. The assholes at Neflix Inc. have successfully traced my IP address and determined I no longer live at home. They have removed me from my ‘household,’ and are asking for $8 to stay up on the Love is Blind drama. I refuse, so the streaming platforms and I are locked in a war of attrition that can only end in a newfound allegiance to pirating. I am being isolated from the culture one paywall at a time, which is probably a good thing, actually.
Going on a long walk with no music. Eye contact. Not talking.
Springtime feeds on summer’s upcoming absolution. Each year I watch with anticipation as the season becomes itself in pieces, in sunny hours that stretch into longer, warmer days. There are false starts and stutters, April snows, but it comes eventually. I jump the gun and wear my tank tops and shiver my way to campus. There is no point in waiting impatiently. Instead, I eat my plums and write long lists of nearby mountain ranges. My socks go musty in the broken dryer—I sigh and search for a clothesline for the basement, for this familiar hell I will know another year. I sort through my dresser and unburden myself of the odd jeans and the ill-fitting long sleeves. My bookshelf swells with dollar-bin paperbacks.
Summer only becomes an impossible fantasy when you wait for it passively. That restless feeling can stick you down where you are—sometimes it’s comforting, the snail’s pace, the thought that you can control anything if you plan for it long enough. But it never quite happens that way. Follow spring’s example—might as well start it now, in pieces, the changing.
This is beautiful as always, Amalia. I am proud to be a part of your journey.