Winter is gone. Each day arrives abruptly with birds at the window, not trilling but shrieking, honking. Each afternoons is warmer than the one before, and longer. There's something about spring. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but it always makes me feel weirdly aching, wanting. Lonely would be the easiest word for it, even if it's not the most accurate.
It may have to do with once having lived in a place where every year around this time a dead world came alive again. Where iced rivers groaned and choked and finally gave way. Then one evening the peepers would erupt for the first time, and all the next day people walked around with this glassy eyed look on their face, as if they were recalling the first time they fell in love, or the time in their lives when their children were tiny infants. Even kids walked around looking like this, even though their lives were still too fresh to remember anything so distant and so poignant, but they felt it anyway.
Spring isn't like that any more for me. And it always feels strange. I go about my day feeling like I've forgotten something, or I'm supposed to be somewhere that I'm not. There's something I'm missing so terribly- but what is it?
I thought having Olive would alleviate that sense of unsettledness, but instead I feel it with greater urgency because I'm feeling it for me, and for her. I recognize it in her already. She is mine.