March 20th, 2026

DN24. R6. The metal numbers are still there. Clinging faithfully to the wooden electric post, tacked down with more fervor, probably by someone tired of the defeated, dangling look of them, rather than the city. My gas station cup of Dr. Pepper is here, too. Not plastic this time. Paper. I guess it’s coated in something, to prevent the liquid from making the interior mushy, but it’s still mostly paper. It doesn’t sweat on the sides. All of the condensation is on the lid, instead.

You aren’t here. You were never going to be. There’s only so much SZA you can cry to and Popcaan you can dance to before the weight settles and you have to live with it. A lot of what you taught me was completely inadvertent, which I recognize was (and is) never your intention. I know who you are. I know whom I never want to be. I was warned, of course. I’m still glad I did not heed it. I am all the better for it.

You are not. I know that. As the wind settles, the meadowlarks return, and the grass greens, your cycle continues. I love you all the more for your stubbornness. I hate you all the more for your idiocy.

Ants crawl across the cement patches in my front yard and I think of him, his smiling eyes and wiggling feet. He is older, shorter, and darker than you. I loved him in the first twelve hours. My pattern of intense affection persists. I knew not to tell him even sooner. My habit of emotional spillage does not. 

I doubt you are proud of me. I think you are jealous. Not only of him, but of me. I let people touch my heart with the kind of abandon you have never experienced or fathomed. He deserves it in an unmentionable, wordless way that you never have. He makes me laugh. His hands are soft with moisturizer and hardened by the realities of time. I do not have to stand on tiptoe to kiss his face. I do not need to stretch my palms out wide to catch his faithless hands.

The spring equinox officially begins, as I am writing this, in one hour and twenty-nine minutes. I know it will not make me move on from, forget, or forgive you. It will not make me let you go. I know also that it will not heal every festering, you-shaped wound.

But that is not what it’s for.

This year is for me.