Spring

Is it really? I notice it sneak up on me, sweating in my heavy coat while the people who read weather reports laugh and soak sun. I don’t want to believe them, so I keep the coat on. Later in the week I walk from my office to the corner of 17th and I streets and I feel naked and vulnerable to the elements, clutching my hoodie while the street embraces short sleeves. I’m a coma patient jerking upright after a long sleep, my head off the pillow and staring straight ahead, not making any sudden movements until I gather my bearings—an abuse victim unsure of this trick of kindness—untrusting—waiting for the next punch.

Everything about me shuts down in winter except my ability to accept the cold. 7 years of DC winter and I still don’t layer myself properly, and my boyfriend laughs at me for being miserable yet unwilling to allay my mental state by dressing appropriately for the temperature. It’s my internal summer, I tell him—too strong in my nature to admit the obvious or acquiesce to any other state of mind.

I have tried to fight my internal summer, particularly these last few months. Every morning I look from my 2nd floor window and see what people on the street are wearing, and I apply twice their amount of thickness. If I overdo it, it’s no big deal, because I like to sweat.

When I go to the gym, my favorite part isn’t the workout, it’s the steam room. In the harshest moments of February the steam room is one of my few smiling pleasures. I sit there like an animal in a zoo, sweating in my cage, connecting to my natural habitat. With these first days of warmth I should feel a return to equilibrium and freedom from the cage, yet this year, I’m sluggish. Tense. Frustrated. Even depressed. I’m beginning to wonder if there is such a thing as post-winter stress disorder.

My roommate went to Results this weekend and barely got out of the place alive. The inspiration of the male reproductive cycle as it emerges from the dormancy of winter is thicker than water vapor, and the smell of men in heat makes free weights and cable pulleys sticky with the stink of lust, propagation, and ass babies that never live. One shot from a starter pistol and this Gomorrah would tear itself apart in a shrieking fury of baboon screams, burning cum, and shredded spandex. I’ve noticed this imprint of male biology in my own gym, but instead of joining the pack and reveling in blood frenzy I feel like a vernal abortion—primed for new birth but instead discharged through Winter’s asshole and left shaking and uncertain under the sun.

But there’s hope for me. I realize that sometimes you must kickstart your own engine, so this Saturday I spent 8 hours painting, shoveling, and cleaning the front yard/foyer of my place, otherwise known as “Castle Greyskull,” AKA the ugliest house in Shaw. It’s amazing what a fresh coat of paint, a little elbow grease, a progressive intention, and a day outside under beautiful weather can do for a person’s spirit. Furthering this attempt to meet spring half way, I renamed my domicile “Casa Villa,” with an understanding that said name would only be spoken with a slow, deep, heavily accented growl one might hear from a tactless Latin American pimp after two packs of unfiltered Pall Malls and a tequila bath. I feel prickly and awake just thinking about it.

A little madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown —
Who ponders this tremendous scene —
This whole Experiment of Green —
As if it were his own!
-Emily Dickinson