Spring

Will you let your guard down now?

Delonix Regia (2021) by Bony Ramirez

As I was waiting for the train this morning a woman bent over and stuck her face into a bright yellow herd of crocus. Making her way back up she gave a smirk. She stayed looking down for a minute or two, admiring them. This all seemed like a very sensible thing to do. Spring suddenly exploded onto us, it was a cornflower blue day with sheets of green grass laid out before us. I was wearing my new glasses that no longer require me to squint. I saw all this with a crispness I’ve been missing - I see we are worthy of smelling flowers on the street corners. I see that the warm weather refuels our hope. I see there are numerous ways of finding our peace.

After getting back from a sensational wedding in Colombia my brain is no longer a heavy, weighty thing. I’m no longer marinating on my intrusive thoughts, no longer chewing on its morose feelings. I no longer find myself grinding all of my rusty nerves, simmering on frivolous things my ego drums up. I’m trying to focus on love, I’m trying to focus on getting di**ed down from my husband in this gorgeous weather. I’m trying to focus on opening my windows and blasting reggaeton so loud it upsets my neighbors. I want to cook for the people that I love. I want my brain to be lightweight and permissive, I want it to be something that doesn’t get punctured by the grief of having to raise kids in this country. 

I always cry at weddings. It’s inevitable for me. I think about the presence so much, I want to cement myself into these perfect moments and never release them into the mundanity of normal life. These are the moments I’m talking about: witnessing the union of two hopeless romantics amongst a sea of people who love them the most. Witnessing the bride and groom and their toothy smiles. They are present, unguarded, grateful, obnoxiously in love. Everyone in the room is growing in unison, we are here because we believe in it, something called love. We will pay oodles and oodles of cash to show you it still exists. We will travel wherever the invite tells us to go just to pay witness to it. We will pray and make promises to one another. We have flowered and have grown wiser thanks to the partner we chose. A wedding is the bride and grooms first chance at something, and for everyone else, it’s a chance to remember how to be toothy and unguarded and obnoxiously in love. Did you see Spring is here? What will the new season bring us? Toothy smiles and wet kisses are waiting.

When I was a kid I really wanted to get married because I really wanted to cook meals for my future husband. I think my grandparents romanticized this for me. My grandmother would spend all day in her kitchen preparing the food we had just collected from the farm. I’m still trying to put into words the experience of sourcing your own food and then preparing it for your family. Some of my technical takeaways so far is this: 

You have to learn how to spot ripe avocados with your eyes and not by touch. If you pluck an avocado before ripeness you just wasted an avocado, and that’s kind of embarrassing. (Don’t even get me started on how to spot a ripe mango.)

You don’t always need to wear gloves when emptying a pig, it’s just recommended. 

Patience is the hardest skill to have when plucking a chicken. 

You have to have really intense grip strength to pull yucca from the ground (and you need to wear gloves)

When you live on a farm you have to do things wrong 100 times before you finally start to do them right. 

When you want to do things the right way for someone just so they can eat well, it’s a sign you know what love feels like.

When I got married I wanted to master making sofrito. It’s what made my grandparents' house smell so good and what usually prompted my grandfather to give my grandmother a kiss on the cheek and a quick pinch on the butt. We may not have been the most communicative family but our table always overflowed with food, the food we spent the day laboring over: white rice, black beans, boiled yucca with garlic mojo, avocado salad, fried plantains, cerdo, pollo al horno. I’d pull the bottle of Crown out of its purple velvet sack and pour it for my grandfather. Two ice cubes, no water. My grandmother would have multiple pitchers of ice water on the table because we’d all be sweaty messes by dinnertime. I’d sit down and realize my hair smelled like I had just rolled around the grass with the dogs. This was our version of “I love you,” so it didn’t always need to be said. I want to move my family to a farm so badly because I would love the sh*t out of them there. Give me my apron your honor, deliver me your hardest labors, I’m in love!! 

But what happens after marriage? After you’ve convinced your partner into a lifelong union? Do I want to cook sofrito everyday and get a kiss on the cheek and a quick pinch on the butt everyday? Personally? No, reader, I definitely do not. The bad part about love, I think, is that it’s hard to steer the ebbs and flows of it all. 

My therapist tells me relationships are unbalanced. It’s a script she tells me whenever I feel like my tanks running on empty. It can’t always feel good to devote yourself to someone else because you will eventually start to forget why you were put in this grief stricken world. Purpose becomes this slippery fish that’s hard to pin down and most of the time just escapes back into the sea.

But today is 85 degrees and the trees and the tulips and the crocus are exploding. These flowers are bright colored little thots begging for attention. Today I want to be half as slutty as they are. I could forgive all of my shortcomings on a day like this. I could take a good peck on the cheek and a pinch on the butt from my husband. I could forgive my children for showing me the darkest parts of myself. I could forgive my grandfather for dying on me. Seasons come and go. People entering a marriage are entering the ultimate sacrifice of getting your heart torn up just to feel what the word “love” feels like. But, like, love, love. Do you know what I mean? Do you know what love is? Does love come easier now that spring is here? Will you let your guard down now?

When I was in 4th grade I wrote an essay about love and dedicated it to my parents. In my essay I wrote about my dad surprising my mom with a tennis bracelet for Christmas. I have never seen the way they looked at each other at that moment. It was the most romantic transaction I’ve ever seen, still engrained in my mind, and I tried my best to describe it in my essay. My attempt was sweet and naive and full of yearning. Mrs. Hunter read it and told me to never stop writing. I saw what love was then, but here I am still feeling like I’ve yet to understand it, but also knowing that I witness it every single day. But perhaps that’s why Mrs. Hunter told me to keep cranking these words out, maybe we can pin down this slippery fish somehow.

Anyway, I love weddings and I love food and I love spring. Somehow all these things require something to overcome. I love that weddings are a big f**k you to the naysayers, to the people that renounce love out of fear. I love food and all its labor, knowing that the dish in front of my family took hours to make. I love knowing that if we go out to eat it means the labor is missing and that’s sort-of the best part. I love spring because this winter almost killed us with the viruses my son brought home from school every week. There’s so much adversity, and we’ve conquered them all. Love feels so real today. Do you feel it? 

Winter is behind us and the world is definitely on fire. But the world isn’t even a beautiful place anymore. We can’t rely on the world the way we can rely on our family, on our partners, on the old friends scattered across the world who come together just to pick up where we left off. Beauty isn’t the point as much as growth is. I want to be unguarded and grateful, I’m tired of being so cautious and callous. As long as we have hope and these slutty little flowers projecting from the mulch. As long as we have weddings and spring and food. Spring comes around when you least expect it. Hope is the last thing to die. Love is a testament to pulling things from the ground and turning it into something only you can make.

If my husband reads this he’d probably ask me if I’m sad.

I’m having a great day.