In the evening yesterday, we talked about autumn. I said it was still far away; it’s April still. It’s May, I was corrected. It is May already. April has ended. I did not realise it, I said. I was too happy to notice the changing of months. Time zooms past when one is too happy or too sad. I do not know where my days have gone, but I do not want a tally now. For the first time in my life, I am okay with days passing me by, for I know I am making the most of them. I don’t know where April went. I am okay with it. There are flowers in May. There is music, too.
May. It was a beautiful word; a goddess turned to a month, turned to a sign of hope, of possibility, of chance. To be in your May was to be in full bloom. The simplest words have the happiest origins. They are elaborate stories of silent collaboration, of cultures lending vocabulary to one another, of confusion between what came first and what later, of an unsaid agreement over this is how we shall use it going forward. There was beauty in language; you did not need a dictionary to notice it. If I was, by some magic, sent back to live years ago, they would tell me I was in my May. I would smile and tell them they were correct.
I remember last May: how I struggled to breathe with a foot in sickness and the other in uncertainty. We could never know the extent of how things transform us. It was the only thing that made us human—this instinct to find meaning. It was all we had; it was all I had. The meaning often arrived a year later. That is why repetition was necessary; we needed the days to repeat, the months to repeat, over and over. It was not important to know how seasons changed; it was imperative to know how they changed us.
Hope burgeons all around; some of it has sprouted in me, too. I could not have known it had I not known it was May already. In a blink, it will be autumn, and I may sit in a coffee shop, remembering these words, these weeks wistfully, and then, before I know it, May will arrive again.