Vernal Equinox

So, briefly, it's been a rough week. Two days ago, a woman had a heart attack and passed away in the building in which I work. I worked moderately closely with her, and I've been having a hard time coping. She was only 51, was set to retire in June, and seemed perfectly healthy. I saw her walking the halls in the morning, and everything was fine.

Then she had an episode where she very suddenly became short of breath, and that was that. The end.

It's been a too real lesson in mortality and how precious life is. All the platitudes we know and memorize come to slap us in the face.

I wrote this piece to cope with that. Here goes.

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Vernal Equinox

The First Day of Spring doesn’t necessarily feel like the first day of spring. They are different times, separate events, though both easily recognizable somehow. There’s a difference between the vernal equinox, when the planet stands in equal lengths of light and darkness and there’s some bogus legend about standing an egg on its end, and the first day of spring, when you leave your house still wrapped in a coat despite the air quality being different. There’s an edge of warmth that wasn’t there before, an undertone to the scene of fresh dew, birds singing a sweet song rather than geese honking garishly on their journey south. It smells fresh and warms the bones and the heart and the lungs. It feels new.

Ironic, because it is not new. It happens every year, the same way. And yet it somehow evokes a sense of rebirth, even though that birth is right back into the same patterns we’ve had all our lives. We still wake up and go to work. We still drive home, though maybe now it’s with the window down, though we did that last year, too. We might go for a walk outside - again, only new this calendar year, not a brand new notion. We might breathe more deeply. We might sit on our porches. We might do all the same things we did last year but with the thrill of it being the first time in months we’ve been able to.

Time makes everything new again. Spring makes everything new again.

Parents take their children to the park, where they can run around and climb on jungle gyms and roll in the grass, which isn’t fully green yet and is still wet with the last remnants of winter. And dirt will pick up on their clothes, but at least we don’t have to be cooped up inside anymore, right? Oh, those pesky children who drive us utterly out of our minds. We’ve been stuck inside with them for so long, forgetting that this is what we wanted, that when we were children, we dreamed of having children, that as adults we may have planned and tried to have them, that there are many who can’t have them or struggle to make those dreams come true.

But we complain anyway, ignoring the burning hearts of others, because they aren’t us.

Time has forced us to forget our dreams and replace them with complaints and complacencies.

We are aware of our own ticking time bombs, at least tangentially. We may not think of it at every turning moment, but it has burrowed into the backs of our brains, and sometimes it reaches it’s tickling tentacles out to poke us.

But sometimes, time slaps us in the face with it.

While children play, and new life grows in wombs, and adolescents wander carelessly through fluorescently lit hallways, absorbed with themselves, death takes away. It robs. It strikes without any sense of fairness or age or health.

There was a woman, and she was beautiful. She walked with poise and grace, and she cared about others. She worked to make lives of children better, and whether or not you agreed with her opinions, she was pleasant and polite, and she tried her best. And one morning, the morning of the first day of spring, April 3, 2019, her breath was stifled and stolen, and a freak blockage stopped her heart. And among adolescents and adults, men and women and children concerned with their own lives and stresses, she gasped her last struggled breath and left this mortal coil.

No more sunshine on skin.

No more dew on grass.

No more fluorescent lit hallways.

No more sounds of children playing.

No more hopes and dreams forgotten.

No  more sloughing off the cares of others.

No more.

Time is the great equalizer. With time, none of us will exist. With time, we may destroy the world due to carbon emissions or nuclear war, certainly through lack of empathy, but either way, we will not be here to see the end result. Nor will anyone. We will be equally dead and dust.

We will be equal.

And the grass will grow. And the rain will fall. And spring will come back. And things will be reborn.

The same.

But different.