New York in Spring
by Maddie DePuy
New York In Spring
New York in Spring is full of pain and daffodils. The bodegas have mastered the art of deception: splashing flowers into the freezing mid-morning, making you think for a moment that the season has turned. They do these one-act plays every day, pouring coffee into those aching glass carafes, stacking peonies on the street. I walk past and am suddenly Othello, suddenly Ophelia. If the roses stand naked in the April air, will my thoughts do the same? Something spills from the sky at 10am, maybe it’s warmth, maybe it’s reconciliation, maybe it’s just taffy-tinted light. The wind whips and I pull my coat closer to my cheeks.
It’s not that Spring won’t come after all, but why the bait-and-switch? Must we live through March on the ledge of what’s here and what glimmers on the edge of May? Wear a jacket on a coat day or a coat on a jacket day and you’ll know what I mean. Can we ever get it quite right? New York in Spring is very much like you, very much like me, we’re all balancing something. We’re all in mid recovery…do your insides still crack from January? Or from the thing she said in passing? Or from the thing he never said? What are you nursing from Winter? Will you let the sunlight hit it by June? At whatever cross streets you feel safest, look up towards the sky and feel the flush. Maybe, sometimes, healing happens in an instant.
I like that flesh and flowers are both pink. Raw, violent, elegant, delicate. Pumped with lifeblood. In the balance, in the push and pull, the city rustles something in my ear. The road of waiting is a New York sidewalk in Spring. Prone to duplicity, concrete, ashen, peppered with the art of thinking you’ve arrived when you haven’t. Stretching in one particular direction. The secret is to keep going, to resist the theatre. To admit you hate the grey. And then one morning, you will be walking and it will be the coatless day, the roses will be proud and New York in Spring will say, “You made it, didn’t you?”
xoxo
Maddie