The air is itchy in the spring. Not metaphorically—there’s a real, low-grade irritation to it, like static clinging to skin. I constantly find myself flinching at sun rays and dew in fear of something I’m not entirely aware of yet. My skin doesn’t feel like the protective boundary it did in the winter. This feels negotiable. Like the air is trying to enter me in small, polite ways—through my throat, my eyes, the thin space beneath my fingernails.
This is the kind of weather that you can see before you feel and looks can be deceiving. The sun, for instance, is not the soft, crayon-yellow circle we were taught to draw—it’s a stark, blinding white. I’m not sure where kindergarteners get the former idea from. Maybe from the same place as those round, effortless smiley faces: innocence.
Colors become too sure of themselves. Like the hypnotic, Cinderella, storybook blue sky above. You can get lost in it if you pay too much attention. It’s how men go mad at sea—staring at something long enough for it to begin to stare back. Believing something into existence.
People start sprouting outside again. Emerging from their burrows alongside their beastly counterparts, equipped with pent up conversation and kinetic energy. I watch them the same way I watch the sky—too long, until something begins to feel wrong about it.
It’s uncanny. Literally. The way the grass glistens and the sidewalk sweats. The way the air has a heavy sweetness that hangs just beneath notice. Even the shadows are unreliable; they lag and glitch as the world itself buffers. Spring doesn’t arrive all at once. It gathers. Quietly. Patiently. Until one day, summer is already here, leaving spring as nothing more than a romanticized memory. A season improved by distance. It always feels like something I’ve already lost while I’m still inside it.
So, do not tell me about your upbringing until we’ve discussed the weather. Not before we’ve stood still long enough to feel the thickness of the air pressing gently against us. Not before we’ve kissed it, half-jokingly, and waved back at the polite grass blades as they nod in quiet agreement. We can decode each other once we finish decoding the clouds and their hydroglyphics written in vapor and light.
Fantasy and imagination are more intimate than confession. It requires more intention to curate. Anyone can recount a past—it’s already happened. But to imagine, to interpret, to notice? That demands presence. It demands that you stay.
Let’s agree on what we’re seeing before we start explaining.
Like composing music or building a dance, small talk requires intention, experience, and talent. Curiosity, that is. Depth isn’t something you declare—it’s something you earn in increments, in the willingness to notice, to linger, to ask without rushing toward an answer. So I find it extremely off putting when someone who cannot hold a basic conversation expresses their incessant desire for “deep” ones. As if the desire for connection itself is a shortcut around the work it requires.
Maybe that’s why I trust the weather more than people. It never pretends. It just surrounds you until you notice.
You would probably call this overthinking. I call it paying attention.
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