The Unnamable Ache
April 5.
The sky is a mocking shade of robin’s egg blue, and the air smells like wet earth and possibility. By all accounts, I should be light. I should be blooming alongside my mother’s Bougainvilleas in its pretty shade of red and magenta. I should be unfurling my stiff (prolly a bit lazy because of the weather) limbs and reaching for the sun. Instead, I am heavy. I am anchored by a weight that has no name and no origin story.
Such specific cruelty to feeling low when the world is rising (even if the world is in the middle of chaos and hope). When the trees were skeletal and the ground was flooded, my internal chill felt appropriate shared survival. But now the contrast is a scream. Why does the sun feel like a spotlight on an empty stage?
I try to dissect it, to find the why so I can fix it. I check the usual suspects:
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Grief? No one has died.
Regret? Nothing new has been broken.
Loneliness? I am surrounded by voices.
Yet, here it is. It’s a phantom limb of a feeling. It’s the sadness in spring, a melancholy that doesn’t need a tragedy to justify its existence. It feels like static on a radio station, just a frequency of interference that makes it hard to hear the joy happening around me.
Perhaps the sadness isn’t despite the beauty, but because of it. Spring is a season of transition, and transition is inherently terrifying. It is the bridge between what was and what will be, and sitting on that bridge feels precarious.
We are told that spring is a beginning, but every beginning requires an end. To bloom, the seed must break. Maybe this lingering ache is just the sound of that breaking. Like an internal friction of moving forward when a part of me still wants to hide under the cold rain.
I am tired of looking for a reason to be sad. Maybe the feeling is allowed to exist simply because it does. Like the rain that falls on a perfectly sunny day, it doesn’t need my permission or my understanding to dampen the pavement.
So, I will sit with it. I will let the April sun hit my face while this unnamable thing sits in my chest. I won’t try to solve it like a puzzle or cure it like a fever. I’ll just acknowledge that today, the flowers are blooming, the birds are returning, and I am sad,
and for now, that has to be okay.
