Work Text:
(Where the grass lulls my body to sleep. Where the breeze soothes my wandering soul. Where the ground promises to stay below. Let it be soft.)
Spring is the cruellest season, arousing hope and ambition in the blossoming land, mixing illusion and belief, filling the awakening air with unbound promise. Spring is the season that sparkles. Green fields desperate to bloom peek out from under blankets of crisp white snow. Up above, as high as hope, the skies are blue and infinite.
What had lain dormant awakens.
(And spring for me is daisies ripped from the land. Torn off petals floating in the wind. Loves-me-loves-me-nots. Being other. The arrival of a peculiar kind of sadness.)
March is the cruellest month, breeding lilies out of the dead land, mixing memory and oblivion, nurturing new life with spring rain. Winter had offered us shelter, covering Earth in forgetful snow. The lakes had been frozen solid only a few days ago, but now they are flowing and lapping and rippling in the gentle breeze.
The sky, in its longing, has given everything to the light. The sun, the bright sun, that brings back not light alone, but new life, and hope, and richness to man. The light by which we are born. The light by which we shall return.
In spring, the light holds promise.
The gentleness of the light passes through the rich tree branches; how it lovingly greets the Earth, how it softly carries us from winter into spring, how it colours the world with its hues in the most golden of colours. In the warm tones of spring, nothing of the cold of winter seems so enormous that it could never be surmounted.
In the early spring of March, for a moment – for a fleeting moment locked in the absurdity of existence, Sebastian almost believes he could start again.
(It’s endurable, it’s endurable.)
Spring has returned, and with it a promise based on a falsehood: that the dead return.
***
What lives undimmed in Sebastian’s mind more than a decade later is a kiss at dawn in a dewy meadow, and sitting on the edge of a lake. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. (Let this be love and not longing.) Now he knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.
A man’s whole life in a single day. Just one day. And in that day his whole life.
Sebastian was home.
(In another time, in another place, perhaps, we could have been happy together.)
***
In spring, there is urgency. So much urgency – to change, to escape the past.
Spring as metamorphosis.
Is it not a reflection of nature’s primordial desire for change, modification, alteration? For transformation, evolution and growth? To be something else, to transcend oneself, to become something other?
(Help me polarise.)
In the early spring of March, Sebastian embarks on his annual pilgrimage to the place where innocence was lost and acquiescence coerced. To the place where lightness fell and darkness arose. (Some say the bright rises, and the dark falls. I know this to be untrue, for I no longer live in the bright hour.)
Spring is a pilgrimage to a time that once was. To people who once were. To a prayer that never was.
Forever bound to those heavy days of March, when love became an act of defiance.
***
On that fateful day in the early spring of March, hidden away in the quiet beauty of my morning meadow, I had been contemplating whether to speak, or to die.
From the moment I had first laid eyes on him, the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us had arisen: a friendship so much needed by us both in our exile. Looking back on it now, I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which had laid the foundation. I speculate the string was attached many lifetimes ago.
In the quiet moments spent in my meadow of solitude, I marvelled over it. Wasn’t friendship, after all, its own miracle? The finding of another person who, somehow, made the entire loneliness of existence seem less lonely?
On that fateful day in the early spring of March, I had invited Kimi into my world.
He sat with me in my silence.
Silently, within myself, my hands wanted to touch his hands. (Because we had hands.) To have his hands within my own, and to become those other hands as those other hands were becoming my hands – frankly, simply, I yearned to fade into him. To float into the abyss of touch.
Is it better to speak, or to die?
And then something extraordinary happened: I heard my silence speak. He, too, was fluent in silence.
“What do you want?” He asked me.
What I had wanted, in that moment, was to have not looked up at the only right time, the intended time, the millisecond I had been destined to look up into the eyes of my own fate, not the world’s. What I had wanted, in that moment, was to continue being everything that I am not.
“To be with you in hell.”
(This was not about anything so shallow as physical desire. They wanted each other in the way of flesh wanting to knit itself together over a wound.)
I choke down the feeling, and Kimi’s trembling, but he reaches over and he touches me, like a prayer for which no words exist, and I feel my being taking root in my body, as if I have discovered something I don’t even have a name for. (They gave me a name and alienated me from myself.)
So this is what it feels like to encounter the authentic self.