It’s spring outside and the days are long and it gets dark late at night, past 8:30 when I’m home. I’m happy stomping my feet in the fresh clean grass and I don’t mind the back sweat clinging to my T-shirts and the way I can’t help but hate my body. I don’t care, as long as I can prop my hand up through the window to feel the breeze and as long I can see the sun glint the sideview mirrors of the car, I can feel all cheesy and soft inside. I like to watch the college students share picnic dinners on the grassy shore of the Charles; I like when they sit in circles and wear bandanas and sunglasses, smiling with their 6pm rosé smiles and glinting teeth and whisper to each other, and sometimes I’ll see someone scurry by on the cement on a pair of roller-skates or a bike, and the sunlight dances shadows through the trees, the trees that are impossibly green. Green, shiny, and full of life they swell with the late spring breeze, and they lazily hang over the road so I don’t see the blue of the sky when I look up through the sunroof, only leaves of green. Today I walked home after I saw the fish and I filled a cup with frozen cherries and I ate them with a plastic spoon while listening to Josephine Foster and I felt rather pleased with myself. I am going to read now.

In this time I think of my life six months ago; lest I forget the burning cold of winter, the gray that envelopes Boston in a ceaseless ashen fog. Even in that winter though there is still beauty; I watch dark birds flee the sky and little children cross the street bundled up in red, blue, green, and I feel that same tug of love in my heart for the world I live in. It’s melancholic, the connection I have with this world, and yet it finds its own balance [I find my own balance], between the anxiety of what could be, the anger of what is, the hope for what could be, the satisfaction for what is. I wish I could do more.  

Of course, we say goodbye to some things (like winter), and forget we say goodbye to others, perhaps for good reason (like the ashen fog), and some things we don’t want to say goodbye to but must anyways (like friends), and there’s a balance somewhere in all of that, I imagine. Something like a hallway between open and shut doors, or perhaps the door itself is the pathway between one state and another.

I am sixteen now. and I will say goodbye to some things soon and other things later, and perhaps a hello or two will be mixed in there. For now though, it is late spring, and I am here, here in this moment when I am listening to Billie Holiday and my empty cup of cherries is resting on my bureau. For now, I am here in a room that is not too small for me nor too big, and I will be here now, I feel like I will always be here in the way that most things continue for a long time until they don’t. And I am okay with that.