It doesn't feel like spring.

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I don’t mean that the evenings aren’t getting longer or that the daffodils aren’t peeking, because they are. Or that I haven’t started to daydream about sweaty, languid days at Riis, because I have. But since I’ve gotten close with someone who lives outside, my concept of “spring weather” has changed. It’s getting warmer doesn’t mean as much if one can still die of exposure after the sun goes down. April showers lose their whimsy when you consider what even an hour in cold, wet clothing can do to an aching body that can’t even risk sitting on the concrete because of the rats. And then there’s this new war, which, despite the season, feels like summer and winter at once—the burning and privation, the extremity and lack. Not that I know anything about war, which I’ve always encountered through a screen. But my friend, who at this moment is standing hot-kneed and fat-footed on some gentrified corner of Brooklyn, surely does¹.

If spring itself has failed me, it can still be deployed as metaphor. I won’t see many wildflowers here in the city, but a cluster of my work from over the past year or so has begun popping up here and there, a mini-bloom of sorts.