An Advent of Sense

The sweet and small indications of Spring’s coming were positively allegorical for the place in which she felt her life currently existed.   Like a cold, drawn-out Winter, she had watched her own leaves dry up and fall away—not settling down, but settling. People, like seasons, see many phases in their years.   The Winter is not to be feared nor does it live to burden.   It is simply a phase, a recurring theme.   It brings strength, great challenge, and a sort of shedding of an outer layer.   She felt her Winter thawing.   A secret, bright and rosy heat now radiated from her.   Her Spring would be all things that are pleasurable and lovely.   Her outer layer, now melting away, was beginning to reveal ancient buried relics, past lives that had always been inside her but were made new by Winter’s chisel.   She was emerging, fresh and fiery as a flower.   All things before her were possible and she saw ...

And over the course of those three or so months she spent living and studying in Tuscany, she felt more creative, inspired, singular, and aware than she had in what may have been years. Once again sensing mastery of her own emotions, she was able to concurrently observe her life retrospectively and realistically entertain the future. Her life, and outlook on it, had been changed significantly in the previous months and during her time there...to different degrees and at varying paces. How much of it had to do with the breakup she eventually initiated after three years spent unknowingly, and foolishly in her blindness, making herself emotionally subservient to the same broken man? Or perhaps to do with the sudden onset, and then creeping end, to the life of her uncle who suffered from stage four brain cancer...a man with whom she was admittedly not very close? Or, on that strain, the recurring motifs of death that quietly swarmed her--Uncle, ex lover's concession of his occasion...