Spring Cleaning: Ripe Fruit Rots With Time

‘The New Novel,’ by Winslow Homer (1877). Springfield, Massachusetts.

June 17, 2025

Nostalgic and reflective by nature, I think of every moment that 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 passing 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 another episode.

Newly on medication for the first time, 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 sad, but not quite happy either. A strange limbo where I couldn’t feel anything at all. Maybe I was just 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 is no listening to them.

Branches & Leaves

I have a hard time contemplating 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 when I look at my reflection and am shocked 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 I blinked and am suddenly all grown up, because I recall each moment in between then and now, sometimes so vividly, but 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 must have never honestly seen myself marrying him. Yes and no. 

I had hesitations. I was 18. I knew we were catastrophically different. Also, young and possessing no awareness yet of relationships being able to end— a one-and-done mindset— he was good. I had nothing to compare this goodness to, nothing that shed light on its mediocrity. 

Harshly pathetic after the breakup, really and truly pathetic, I spent months inconsolable, devastated. I still write about him too much for my own good. In my defense, it is the only love I have ever known.

Last May, a new chapter came from this boy I met. Sure, there were some I crossed paths with in college beforehand, but none gripped me, changed me. I felt consumed by guilt for moving on more than I ever felt consumed by them.

Then, in the depth of Spring, this boy became all I thought and talked about. We never dated— 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. Where you would give anything, be anyone, just so they keep you around. I would say that’s the opposite of casual, this disgusting sacrifice of yourself for a glimpse of them. I went from dreaming about wedding bells to begging 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 when we caught up, long after it ended. He said I idealized him, made him into a fantasy. I put him on a pedestal, but had no grasp of why. I stayed quiet, knew it to be true.

Most of the time, with anyone, it’s 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 obsessive, I’d tell you Spring. 

That year in between the seasons, I spent it half-dead. I became unmoving, unblinking. Nothing excited me anymore. I fell behind in nearly everything— academics, friends, passions. I was this ghostly being floating by. Walking through walls and people. A cold chill of a presence, something to sense, not see.

When Fall rolled around, a haze fell away. The lavender leaves crisped to brown and gold. I woke up one morning and saw the low point I rested in, this hole I dug. Except this time, I ran out of refills from the doctor, and everyone around me saw me sitting there, too, like a horrific display case.

By late Winter, and my 20th birthday, I felt alive again. Colors reappeared that I had forgotten existed.

And now, as Spring recircles, I am afraid. To have a conversation regarding a confession of feelings, to hear the response. To lose color again.

In the last two years, I have grown to be awfully scared of love— the antithesis of my being. I used to chase it without restraint, because to love, you must not fear it. You acknowledge it might leave you breathless, out of control, and perhaps a crushed, lifeless husk, and you jump anyway. That’s what makes it beautiful. 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 a partnership as one does for a divinity. 17 and looking at this boy in a Nike sweatsuit like he was God.

This boy, whom 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 feel 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 not letting either happen. Running, hiding.    

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 perhaps anything else. 

I want to say with it’s how women are, and have always been, raised to think. A reflection of society more than a reflection of the woman. She is a product of a world catered to the power of men. A world that has long existed. 

I also want to say I am this woman. I never took the time before to reflect on myself and admit that 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 it is detrimental to who I am as an individual. I am both a product and a producer.

A Margaret Atwood quote haunts me:

“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” (The Robber Bride, 1993).

Yes, I am aware that I analyzed the last two years of my life through my reaction to men. Through my emotional openness with 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 words. 

I have found romantic relationships to be a useful mirror to see behaviors, patterns, and personality through. 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. It is terrifying, witnessing this loss of myself. Addictive, too.

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. I feel special in their gaze, but never view them as special. (Concerning? Topic for another time.)

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 psychoanalyze myself through their perception and treatment of me. (Not healthy, definitely… We’ll circle back.)

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. (Spoiler, they don’t.)

Thus, being “male-centered” (counter: patriarchy, the system, generations of mistreatment, etc.) is how I measure where I am in self-security. I also want to be in love. All of the romance novels I read growing up had to shape me somehow. 

Nature is Cyclical

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 have to keep going, I suppose. Might be that 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?). It is O.K.

Now I simply wait for Spring to come so I can do this all over again. Who will they be? Who, then, will I be?