In the springtime, I long for rebirth. I’ve spent years since I approached the cusp of girlhood longing to be reinvented, shedding my old skin and becoming new. It’s a rather romantic and wistful season with the promise of greenery blooming and seasonal depression melting away in the heat of high noon. I always hope to go into the springtime as a pale, worn-down girl chilled from the cold and emerge as a tan goddess ready to brave the summer with grace. Each year this dream never seems to come to fruition and 2022 is no different.
In the few months of the hazy dog days of the academic year, I catalog my time through weekends. I need something to look forward to, something to get me through the treacherous three-hour-long lectures and scorching walks with Margo where she stops to rub her nose in every anthill. So, I spend weeknights at the dining halls with my friends conjuring up where we will exhaust our coveted 48 hours of playtime and Thursday nights trying on outfits for whatever activity is on the agenda. On Friday we buzz around each other, getting ready and listening to one of our many collaborative playlists before we leave, always ending the night in a sprint to get home until we have to drag ourselves up three flights of stairs to reach the dorm. That’s how spring feels to me. Through the weeks of winter, as I am forced to stare at bare trees and the three crewneck sweaters on repeat in my closet, I sprint to the light of spring. I race towards it with open arms and a smile that could crack the earth into two even halves. But when I arrive I suddenly have lead in my shoes, making my feet feel like they each weigh 50 pounds. I curse the thought of having to rely on allergy medicine as my savior and being locked in my dorm room with the work of three online classes that keep me too busy to do the laundry that keeps piling up but not busy enough to stop myself from restarting my go-to comfort show for the umpteenth time.
I will remember this spring not specifically for rebirth or renewal or reinvention. There is no prefix to place upon this season as a shiny new rose-colored lens. I will simply remember it as one with jam-packed weekends, long weeks, long walks, sunburns, and bug bites. It is a taste of summer, one that is so sweet it leaves me aching at the thought of leaving behind my weekends in the city for endless summer days in the suburbs. I will soon have to bid farewell to sharing a room with Kirsten, who was a stranger to me just 10 months ago but is now my other half. When will I ever get to live in the same room as my best friend and our dog, cursing stairs and the daunting hills of the forty acres and the mosquitoes of Waller Creek– this I do not know. But I will relish in the freedom of being nineteen and slathering aloe on sunburned skin, of drinking iced vanilla lattes and treating Zyrtec like a delicacy.
Spring is humid and thick but it is so fleeting and bittersweet. Despite 12-year-old me’s fantasies, I didn’t get reborn. I still have the same freckles on my nose highlighted by too much time in the sun and split ends that I won’t cut off. But, you don’t have to be reborn to grow; I realize that the grand notion of reinvention happens in tiny moments of growth marked by my new nose ring and a job promised to me for the summer. So, I lay in my twin-sized bed the same girl I was in the winter just a few short weeks ago and I prepare to move on with the next season of life.