Equinox

I lay out in Central Park again this afternoon, soaking up the sun, staring at all the eye candy and reveling in the fact that it’s spring. This has been the weekend of Central Park sun. This was the weekend it really became spring.

I’m tired but I can’t sleep. The sun drained me of energy and I have a slight sunburn on my face and arms. With the sunburn, and the whooshing of the new fan I bought on Monday in order to drown out any nighttime noise, I’ve been tricked into thinking it’s the middle of August.

Winter and summer might be the extreme seasons, but fall and spring are the ones that herald change. Never mind the solstices; it’s all about the equinoxes. Perhaps I’m just conditioned from years of living on the academic calendar, but when September arrives and autumn begins, everything feels new. And I can already see down the horizon, one straight path, following an arc through new TV shows, crunching leaves, colder weather, Halloween, Thanksgiving, the holiday season, all culminating in a climax on New Year’s Eve. Similarly, when spring arrives, a new narrative arc begins — warm weather, May, June, summer arrives and the rhythms of the world change, students work in summer jobs, college kids come home, businesses slow down, people go to outdoor concerts, we fall in love and stay up late with our fleeting romantic interests on stifling hot summer nights.

Then summer ends, September arrives and another new season begins.

I’ve been craving a boyfriend this weekend. It’s been two years since I’ve had someone whom I called a boyfriend; that ended two Aprils ago, after two short months. I sort of dated someone long distance last year, but not with much enthusiasm. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to have an automatic Saturday night date, to have someone who’s thinking about you, someone to sleep over in your bed, someone else’s bed for you to sleep in, someone who’s always there.

It’s the beginning of spring but I can see time stretching before me, I can see the summer in the distance, like the horizon of an ocean, with the potential for so much to happen, things I can’t even begin to imagine. Back when I was in high school, I’d sit on the airplane at the end of August, returning with my family to Tokyo, where we lived while my dad worked in his company’s Japan office; I’d sit in the airplane seat, a magazine pocket in front of me, headphones on my head, thinking about the beginning of a new year at the high school I loved: new arrivals from the States with their families, new people to meet, some to befriend, some to develop crushes on; new plays to try out for, new activities to try, so many new experiences awaiting me, new, new, new.

I feel like that now. It’s warm, it’s spring, we’re on the cusp of a new season, so much to anticipate: I will meet new people, visit new places, feel new emotions blaze inside me; there will be misunderstandings and happy moments, new things to feel and to write about and someday to remember, all against a mythic background of the echoes of the ocean and the taste of ice cream.

This is a pregnant moment.