First day of Spring
The comforter had been rolled up in my trunk for two years. The last time it had touched a bed, I lived in a different house, in a different part of Los Angeles, and was a different person. The memories tucked into my Volkswagen’s back end seem to have been salvaged from another life entirely; the lasting mementos of a girl who used to be me.
It has been two years since I left this city. The little hope I had left, along with the handle of a suitcase that once saw different continents, was clutched in my sanitized hands as I made my way through Burbank Airport. I remember tears trickling down my cheeks; their terminus being the cloth mask hastily purchased while the world seemed to have been knocked off its axis. My terminus? Anchorage. My hometown. A place I had spent years running from, only to sprint back to when a pandemic gave chase.
24 months have passed since I filled my car with my belongings — the ones I kept, anyway. My bed went to Ionna, my rug to Johnny, my mirror to Cassidy, my career to the wind. Smaller things — boarding passes, a basketball that showed up the day Kobe Bryant died, a biology textbook, other knickknacks– all went into the trunk. And that’s where they stayed with the rolled-up comforter. Until this morning.
The vernal equinox. Spring. Another winter behind me, along with the past two years. How the time seems to pass even when things feel stagnant. The leaves fall, the flowers bloom. All cyclical. And I’m in Los Angeles again. There was a time — now behind me — when I didn’t think I would say those words “I’m in Los Angeles again”, but I did, I can, and I am.
I was born in the springtime — an April baby. I say I was conceived in the Alaskan summer, where the light never ends. When winter comes cloaking my hometown in dark, I fight it every second. I have never liked the lack of light or the cold. Leaving Los Angeles to return to the place where both blanket the land for more than half the year was daunting. I couldn’t do another winter.
But here is spring in Los Angeles. This new season of hopeful anticipation. The beginning of some wonderful. As the weather changes, the cleaning begins, and I make space for whatever comes next.
When I popped open my trunk, the onslaught of memories came rushing down like a thaw. In Alaska, we call the time when the snow melts and the trees start to bud “break up”, named for the ice melt breaking apart. Break up is what I did. With my pre-pandemic boyfriend. With my life. With my preconceived notions of how things should be.
The other evening, I was walking out of the YMCA in South Pasadena. The sun had already burned off for the night, quietly sitting somewhere south, leaving less than a glow in the sky. The fragrant spring blooms swirled in the dark and — without a mask — I took a deep inhale. Jasmine, a perennial, returning to delight us once again.
Some things don’t come back, but some things do. I did. My trunk is emptied. The comforter is back on a bed. And it’s springtime in Los Angeles, my home.
