monday thing: april 13 (on days of unexpected weather)
do you remember that day it snowed in April?
spring was coming in, cresting green on the trees
and your coat had moved from ever-present drying out on the back of a chair
to hanging in the closet where you had to dig it out
and walked to class with your fingers wrapped around a paper cup
hot with still-steeping tea.
and someone had left the windows in the classroom open overnight
to tempt a spring breeze in and usher out the winter air.
it was so damn cold in there that morning
everyone kept their coats on throughout class
and everyone laughed about it.
oh, lord! that was a bad time
you were miserable.
that was the semester your room flooded over break
and you caught a sinus infection that just wouldn’t move along
and the family cat of eighteen-some years died in her sleep
and you were always caught somewhere between I can’t do this
and I can do this but what will it take out of me?
they say the bad things linger more in the memory
and maybe that’s true:
you have some sharp memories.
you remember the misery. you remember the peaks of it.
you remember the day you fled half-crying from class
and curled up tight in a ball on your bed like you could make yourself disappear.
but most of those days you remember as beads on a string
all tied up together
they’re only a thing because they’re a part of a thing
individually they could drop out of your hand and roll under the bed
and gather dust in the dark.
but! you remember the day you went to your first rehearsal of that play.
you came to that show late. everyone knew each other. you were nervous.
but that day you were early, came in ahead rushing through the rain
and you remember the feeling of sitting alone there in front of the stage
bare feet, socks drying
you remember the book you were reading
and the way something eased up in you as you opened it again and forgot:
–that you were waiting and nervous
–that you were new and uncertain
–that you were cold and damp–
and would have to go back out in that eventually.
everyone was cold and damp when they came in one by one
so just then you had something in common after all
and something to laugh at and complain about with the rest.
and you remember when you went back out in that
you’d never seen so much rain in your life! the sidewalks across the quad were like canals
your converse weren’t made for it. your umbrella couldn’t take it.
you all but had to swim back to your dorm
wet up past the knees and clutching your satchel under your jacket.
but it’s not a bad memory
because nothing got wet that couldn’t dry
and in the end you had to laugh.
what the hell, huh! what the hell was that.
oh, you remember the bits that hurt alright
but it always takes time to see where it all leads out to
what scrapes made you laugh
(check out this bruise I got falling in the art building! jesus those stairs are hard)
and what healed alright
(well it hurt like fuck when that jar fell out of the fridge
had a black spot on my nail for months! but it did work its way out eventually)
and what you were willing to take because it led out of something
(got a hell of a cold out of that snow day but I hadn’t been sledding in ages!
we drank cocoa afterward, my hands were so cold, I’d do it all over again)
or led to something
(god, my throat! I think I swallowed a gallon of water–I was so scared–
–but damn if I didn’t just pass my swim test)
something worthwhile.
and–
what didn’t.
what didn’t hurt so much at the time
but set in you like a crooked bone, and now aches in bad weather?
(the way those counselors talked to me–
–about me–to me–)
and what did hurt, so much
but looking back now it’s all just part of a pattern
and you couldn’t even pick the piece of it out?
(…)
and what wasn’t worth it in the end
all the hurt you were willing to swallow
hoping it would come to mean something.
what hurt do you cough up even now sometimes
standing in the shower, lying awake, thinking
when could I have stopped?
they told me there was a point to all this!
well, it takes time and it takes time
and it’s still taking time
and all you know is you don’t know
how things will look when it’s all behind you.
when this is all over
(is anything ever really over?)
what of it will stand out to you?
what will be the sharp parts?
what will you point to and say yes–that was worth it–
and what becomes nothing more than another bead on a string
another day lost in the calendar
another part of the background
the given circumstances
of this slice of your history?
and against that background, what things too small even to see at the time
will stand out later
with light shining through
like snow in April?
