The Saddest Proof

To be interested in the changing season is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. - George Santayana

Just yesterday (or was it the day before?) I was saying how much I love this time of year – mistaking it for springtime. I pointed at the first wildflowers – little purple buttons of color - as proof. It was barely the winter solstice and there I was prattling on about spring. Some cultures don’t have a way to express a journey away from home. You are always either home or returning home. Your first step on a long journey is your first step toward home. This is how I feel about springtime. We’re either there or returning. I suppose this makes me hopelessly in love. Ah, Springtime - in my world the earth circles the sun for Her.

Sometimes I imagine him rifling though my things, looking for some evidence of my infidelities and instead coming across mysterious things that he simply cannot understand – scrawlings that intimate something he feels just not right about – but ultimately he can’t decipher as proof of well, frankly, anything. One day his heart will break (like mine), “I gave her everything and all she wanted was the Springtime.”

I’m no writer, no poet, no artist, no seamstress – all these creative things I wish I sometimes were – I am not. Perhaps the most glaring evidence that I am not these things is the very fact that I wish to be them. Wanting to be something is the saddest proof that that thing is something you certainly and definitely are not. When we are something, we rarely wish to be it, we simply are it.

The three of us, Ed, Secret Agent Dog and I, snuggled on the day bed and brought in the New Year together. I made us all focus on how much we loved each other as the seconds counted down on the old year and unfolded on the new. We closed and opened the year loving one another intensely. Ed and I toasted with chambord spiked champagne and spoke on our hopes for ought five. Among a laundry list of rather practical things, I said I wanted to figure out, this year, what I want to be.

I know who I have been. In that regard I have a leg up on most people. I also know who I am. It’s who I want to be that’s been somewhat of an allusive beast. I think half the time I’m hiding in front of myself – being exactly who it is I want to be. If that’s true, then half the work’s done. I guess the trick is figuring out which half, eh?

I mean, we already all know that I’m leaving Ed for the Spring.