Meltaway

I should have written a blog post yesterday but I didn’t. Instead, I sat on my roof with my roommate in the bright sunshine and crisp winter’s-on-its-way-out air. I took off my shoes and I drank my English Breakfast Tea with milk and Sweet ‘n’ Low and I ate my whole wheat bagel with cream cheese. I smoked a cigarette and read New York magazine. I peeled off layers and I rolled up my jeans and I put on my sunglasses and I felt peace.

I woke up planning to write. I got up early, got dressed and saw the sun casting its beams on the building next door and I knew I couldn’t stay inside all day. They were the kind of sunbeams that tell you what the whole day is going to feel like, the exact temperature and kiss of the air on your skin. As I was getting dressed, my roommate was all wrapped up in a blanket and heading out the door which, to say the least, is not her usual state of affairs. “What are you up to?” I said. She was going to sit on the roof in the sun, and would I like to join her? Actually, you know what? I would. I could just sit for an hour and then write later.

But I didn’t. As soon as I got up to the roof, I knew it would be a while before I left. After one of the saddest, coldest winters in recent memory, Saturday morning brought hope in the guise of an almost-spring day. I felt relaxation, I felt possibility, I felt the sun morphing my winter skin’s awkward beige pallor and my self into something healthier, more golden, more like what I felt on the inside.

In the depths of winter, just a month ago, DL reminded me that when caterpillars begin the whole cocoon/chrysalis experience, they actually think they are going to die. But then, in the complete reverse scenario, they become butterflies. I wonder if we too have this sort of faux-death experience every winter, when the miserable cold stings our noses and fingers and makes our eyes tear and holes us up in our own cocoons of sorts. And every spring we are created anew, we forgo socks, Vitamin D once again infuses our skin, sunglasses perch on our noses as we walk to the subways that will get increasingly warmer.

I am excited for New York in the springtime. Everyone begins to bubble a little bit more, oozing positive energy and productivity, getting outside just to be in the sun. We get up earlier, we stay out later, the days are longer and that alone just feels good in the body, to have the desire to get out and to be somewhere other than the cocoons that have contained us for so long.

So there I was on my roof, emerging from my cocoon. It was incredible to believe that just the day before there had been a weird ass snow-slush extravaganza monsooning upon us. And now? It has almost all melted away.

Roommate and I sat and talked and didn’t talk and read and drank hot beverages and allowed our legs to see the sun they may or may not have forgotten existed. It is pure solace to know there will be more days like this ahead of us.