You wonder about the heavy feeling hanging on you today.
It's the gray sky, perhaps. When you half-walked, half-jogged to the bus stop this morning, it had rained only a few minutes before. The air was so soaked with it that by the time you made it to the bus stop, there was sweat running down your back. Today you unzipped your coat, a spring day in February. Soon it'll be time to put your wool coat away, which is for the best, because there's a new hole in the right pocket. You bought this coat secondhand in a thrift store your first year living in New York City. The left pocket has already needed to be stitched up. You have no idea how to sew, so you took the coat to California, and your mother brought out her sewing kit, the one her mother bought for her when she was in elementary school. She made careful stitches in the torn cloth, and every time you put your hands in your coat pockets, you feel those careful stitches on the left, and the ragged hole on the right.
It's probably not the sky.
Earlier this week, you got drunk with your labmate and talked about your mothers. The first time you ever got drinks with her, you were both in New York, and she wasn't a mother yet. She has a daughter now. She worries about the kind of mother she is. She read you a quote she'd heard, about love and control. It wasn't really the words that stuck with you, but the earnestness she said them with. It's the way prayers are said.
You've been running for the bus a lot lately. The MBTA is on fire, quite literally, and to try to put it out, they're closing each line one by one to attempt to fix the deteriorating tracks and power lines. Funnily enough, as soon as they close one line, another line happens to blow a power cable, going completely dead for three hours of the workday morning commute. One stitch on the left, one ragged hole on the right.
Walking more is nice, though you wish it was warmer more often. You've made a habit of giving yourself treats. Stopping at Hmart for snacks, buying onigiri at the Japanese bakery. Some of this grayness, you think, must be from the remnants of winter, though you haven't felt that sun hunger quite as sharply this year. Summer was a bad season for you, loud in the worst ways, and it's nice, for now, to be ensconced in February quiet.
There's a lab in your building that studies torpor and hibernation. The waking up part is a real mystery – how can something that was barely breathing wake up again like that? There are a lot of cases in which life can come back from, essentially, the dead. Human eggs, for example, enter a sort of dormancy that can last decades before they're fertilized. The trick seems to be to die in a very organized way, everything quietly put away, everything waiting, more still than asleep.
They'll plant the tulips soon, clusters of them along each train stop. That's how you'll know it's spring.