Spring

By: Gabriela Yareliz

Somehow, I ended up in that train car. It’s one I seldom end up on. It’s the one that starts in the Upper East Side and goes to Brooklyn filled with young, hip, beautiful people.

You have the friends who are chatty and distracted, standing at the poll, giggling every time they almost fall. They are the ones who laugh when they miss their stop. There is the model looking girl with her Zara bags and phone glow on her falsies, as she is glued to her phone when we enter the dark tunnel.

The cool girl with the natural hair, with the military green jacket and Louis Vuitton satchel, the want-to-be athletic ones that wear their athleisure to brunch but not to an actual workout, and the international students who switch from Hindi to English, who are having a serious conversation about subway ads.

Even though it’s just as cold as it was a month ago (if not more), people are sticking to the “it’s spring” program. That means wearing shorts, t-shirts under thin minimalist hoodies and those pants that are cropped enough to make your ankles turn blue, despite the spray tan. (Are people seriously not cold?)

Here in NYC, we are forcing spring upon ourselves, at any cost. However, when we sneeze, it’s cold enough to wonder if it’s the flu or allergies.

Seasons are a magical thing, especially when we are in the middle of the transition. (Here, that transition from winter to spring lasts through June).

King Solomon wrote there is a season for everything. Spring, we are ready for you (as you can probably tell by our wardrobe choices). And just as seasons come and go, and there is a rhythm we have learned to expect from nature, though sometimes tainted by predictions from that groundhog that politicians are constantly “accidentally” killing, life has it’s rhythms, growth and transition. There is no point in forcing it, and a date certainly doesn’t magically turn everything into something different. The first day of spring certainly didn’t kill the NYC winter that has us in its arctic grip. But we can certainly prepare for the transition. There is nothing wrong with being ready for more life.

Time trickles by, and the sun comes out. We are called from our rest, darkness and lethargy to sunshine, life and action.

Spring has always been my favorite. Easter comes with it. It’s a time of new beginnings, resurrection and new life. The old gets put away, the heavy layers and protection are folded neatly and stored away, and we make way for transformation.