March
March is the month that knows it’s turning into something. You can feel it happening even when the weather hasn’t caught up.
March || Spring || Progress || Alex
March arrived like a promise being kept. Not dramatically — Portland’s version of spring was always tentative, always prepared to reverse into grey — but with the specific quality of light that changed in March, became something more golden at the edges, more inclined toward warmth. I was aware of March in my body in a way I hadn’t been aware of months before. Previous Marches had been months to manage through toward the next thing. This one felt like it was worth inhabiting.
The semester had a rhythm now that I loved without needing to examine it. School, where I moved through with the organized efficiency that was genuinely mine rather than defensively mine, with the difference being that now when I ran into Tyler in the hallway we exchanged a nod that had no tension in it, the nod of two people who had left something behind and were both the better for the leaving. School, where Priya and I ate lunch at our usual table and Zara joined us most days and the table had expanded to accommodate the expansion without losing anything. Tuesdays and Thursdays in the library, which were still practice sessions but were also something more, had acquired the particular quality of time that was simply good — the time you were in when you were with the right people and not counting toward anything else. Jamie brought coffee. I brought the notebooks. We argued about arguments. We talked about everything else. We were, irrevocably and without apparent complications, together in the simple and complete way that two people were together when they had arrived at each other honestly. Dad had started asking about Jamie with the casual regularity of a parent who had integrated a new fact and was comfortable with it, asking the questions he would have asked about anyone I cared about: How’s the debate partner? Did Jamie’s mom like the tamales I sent? He had sent tamales. He had done this without being asked. It was the most Carmen Reyes expression of acceptance that I could have imagined and it was exactly right.
Abuela Elena was still with us — she had extended her visit, had said simply that she wasn’t ready to go back yet, which was understood by everyone to mean something more than tourism. She and I talked every evening, the way we had talked since Christmas, in the kitchen over something warm. She asked about Jamie and I told her, and the telling was easy now — not the managed, careful telling of someone monitoring their own disclosure but the natural telling of someone sharing their life with a person they loved. She listened with the warm directness that was her mode, and one evening she said: “You know what I see?” “What?” “I see someone who looks like they took the coat off,” she said. “And found out the room was warm.” I smiled. “That’s Priya’s metaphor,” I said. “Good metaphor,” she said. “Smart girl, your Priya.” “Yes,” I said. “Is she — does she know about—?” I understood the question. About Catalina. About what Elena had told me. “She knows the broad shape of it,” I said. “You didn’t need to keep it for just us,” Elena said. “The story is for anyone who can learn from it.” I thought about that. About what Catalina’s story was for. About the specific purpose of a love kept in a tin box for forty-seven years and then given to someone who needed it. “Thank you,” I said. “For bringing the box,” I said. “For telling me.” She reached across the table and squeezed my hand with the hand that had been making hot chocolate and posole and the irreplaceable things that grandmothers made. “You are braver than I was,” she said again. “And you are going to have a very good life.” I believed her. For the first time in a very long time, I believed completely that the good life was possible and that I was making it.