Spring Cleaning: Ripe Fruit Rots With Time

I’m a nostalgic person, reflective by nature. Every part of life thus far has brought me here. Regrets? Yes, many, as we all have. However, a restless urge to return to a moment? To live within it once more? 

Yet, a thought remains to stagnate, or a memory will turn to still water, and I change my mind entirely. Instances where I think I’d sacrifice anything to go back. Scenes that haunt so vividly I can still smell them, like a woody leather cologne you pass by on the street, taking you back to someone you once knew. 

Seeds & Saplings 

Purple flowers have blossomed on thin, delicate branches Downtown. Shades of lilac, bunched together in bloom. I couldn’t recall seeing them this time last year—May’s end and June’s beginning, as I write this—and it made me think about what I had focused on instead. When I wasn’t stopping to smell the flowers, as they say. 

I had brown hair. I told everyone it was blonde, because I was in denial that the golden head from my youth had grown out. It was brown, though, and I was deep into an episode where I never left bed. 

Newly on SSRI pills, I waited for some spark to come to me. Some ‘Proof of Life,’ as I used to call it. Instead, I rotted away in pink, floral sheets. Not necessarily unhappy, but not happy either. A strange limbo between feeling anything at all. Which could have been just being 19. 

This funny aspect of life— how they warn you of the existentialism to come, the fears, the loneliness, and when it comes, you are still so helplessly surprised. They tell you how everyone experiences the same horror, and when it comes, you feel isolated in it. They prophesy how lost you end up, and when it comes, you will never find your way back. 

And there’s no listening to them. That was never an option. 

Branches & Leaves

I have a hard time thinking about the difference between growth and change. Or whether every noticeable difference between who I am now at 20 and who I was then at 8, 12, or 16 is strictly bad or good. Or how I will eventually be different again and again and again. 

There are these moments where I look at my reflection and am surprised at the adult features staring back. A crevice digs between my brows, and pale, white stretch marks peek out of the sides of my thighs. It’s not that you blink and are suddenly all grown up, because I remember each moment in between then and now, but sometimes that’s exactly how it feels. 

Two Springs ago, I made a file on my laptop of wedding ideas for the person I was with. I pinned dresses and gathered songs we’d have our first dance to. People told me afterward that I never honestly saw myself marrying him. Yes and no. 

I had hesitations. I knew we were catastrophically different. I was also young and possessed no awareness yet of relationships being able to end. A one-and-done mindset. Plus, he was good. Not bad, no, but never great.

I had nothing to compare this goodness to, nothing that shed light on its mediocrity. 

A year later— last Spring— I had been single long enough to officially move on. I was pathetic after the breakup. Really and truly pathetic. A harsh word, but I find it to be accurate. I still write about him too much for my own good. In my defense, it is the only love I have ever known, and I’m sure when I love again, new musings for material will arise. 

Last May, a new chapter came from this boy I met. Sure, there were some I crossed paths with in college beforehand, but none had any real grip on me. I was consumed by guilt more than I was ever consumed by them.

Then, there was the boy who became all I thought and talked about. We never dated, involuntarily to me. My first taste of “casual.” The kind, however, that makes you sick with hatred for the word. The kind where you never understand how it was anything less than the opposite. I went from dreaming about wedding bells to begging someone for breadcrumbs of validation. 

There was nothing special about him, I could say, that brought a reason for it. He called me out on exactly that months later when we caught up long after it ended. He said I idealized him, made him into a fantasy. That I put him on a pedestal, yet had no grasp of why. 

It was all in the timing. There were others I could have just as easily attached to, but I didn’t have the room within myself to do so. Therefore, if I were to name what specifically made me obsess over this man who would not care if I lived or died, I’d tell you it was Spring. 

I think that year in between the seasons, I spent it half-dead. The medication sedated me when I was already asleep. 

I fell behind in nearly everything— academics, friends, passions. I was this ghastly being floating by.

When Fall rolled around, a haze fell away, and I woke up to see the low point I had been avoiding for months. Except I had run out of Prozac refills, and everyone around me could see me sitting there. I couldn’t run anymore, which would save me, I guess. 

By Winter and my twentieth birthday, I felt alive again, as if color had suddenly reappeared and I forgot it was ever there to begin with. I did what I could to be in a better place, and I started to notice I was in exactly that. 

And now, as Spring circles back, I cannot bother to ask to be with someone I have grown attached to. I don’t even want to have a conversation regarding a confession of feelings, because I know the response and don’t care to hear it from his shameful lips. 

I’ve grown to be awfully scared of love. Which is the antithesis of my being. I chased it without restraint, because, to love, you must never fear it. You have to acknowledge that it might leave you breathless, out of control, and perhaps a crushed, lifeless husk. That’s why it’s so beautiful, though, and I used to know this. 

I used to hold onto love like it was my religion. Something to live for, something to believe in as your purpose. I was 16 and praying for partnership as one does for a divinity. 

This boy, I am all too focused on this Spring, has become a mirror of my terror. A projection of my change, or my growth, or my recession. I am O.K. with losing him, because I never let myself get close enough to ever have him. 

Dreams of marriage turned to gut-wrenching rejection, turned to never letting myself be in a place to allow for either to happen.    

Trees & Their Fruits 

I go back and forth between resenting what I sacrificed to be this version of myself and praising what was gained. A deal with the devil, per se, where I’ve exchanged a soul for satisfaction, and now I wonder how satisfied I am. 

The term “male-centered” has been going around in feminist media as an insult to those who have not shed this habit of patriarchal standards. And I get it, I do. How annoying, how insufferable, it is to be a woman and think more of men than probably anything else. 

Without taking responsibility, I’d respond with how it’s how women are, and have always been, raised to think. It’s a reflection of society more than it is the reflection of a woman herself. She is a product of a world catered to the power of men we all live in. 

Taking responsibility, I’ll say I am her. I never took the time before to reflect on myself and admit I put too much value in a man’s opinion of me. So now I sit here at 20 and am filled with such a need to be wanted that is detrimental to who I am as an individual. 

A Margaret Atwood quote has haunted me since 12th grade AP Lit: “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy… You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

So I am aware I just analyzed my last two years through the lens of men, or rather, my reaction to them. I resent myself for it. I do not live for them, but I do live with them in mind. Or inside my mind, if following Atwood’s thinking. 

I have found romantic relationships to be a useful mirror to see behaviors, patterns, and personality through. Perhaps for the same reason BPD symptoms are triggered when in a relationship, being close and intimate with someone reveals insecurities and anxieties. Therefore, when I am invested in a man, it is when I see my darkest character traits most clearly. 

My reflections often orbit around men, love, and how they’ve shaped my emotional development, but not in a self-erasing way. I dissect habits and wounds to autopsy what intimacy has done to me. I use them to see myself, not myself to see them. 

That’s why the one from last year told me I have made him into a fantasy. Ironically, it’s usually the other way around, where a man doesn’t view a woman as who she is but rather what she can provide for him. I think I do that to men. I use them to psychoanalyze myself through their perception and treatment of me. 

Through my romantic interactions, I can see how I have this raging desire to be enough. I am insecure in my capability to be worth staying for, and my attraction to emotionally unavailable men has been a challenge I created to make someone who will never have the intention to stay, change their mind. 

Thus, the “male-centered” trait is how I measure the security I have within myself. I also just want to be in love. Simple as that. All of the romance novels I read growing up had to shape me somehow. 

Nature is Cyclical

I feel as though I went off topic to feed a feminist rant. 

To summarize my initial thought: I have changed over time. Some of it is bad, and some of it is good. However, at the end of the day, there is no going back to fix mistakes or relive days of ignorant bliss. You just have to keep going, I suppose. It truly is what it is. 

Growth isn’t restricted to a positive connotation, and that’s the takeaway. That becoming someone new sometimes means mourning who you were, even if that past self was naive or pathetic. Or if she was loving and kind and hopeful. You can miss and love her, while being someone entirely new (yet you never really shed skin, do you? Just mold within it?). 

Now I wait for Spring to come so I can do this all over again.