Skip to main content

A warning about April.

Earlier, I transcribed a draft of a poem on my litty blog extolling the reasons and ways I hate April. Probably, or eventually at least, less pretentiously/tritely than that sounded.

Regardless, here's a bit of a conversation/rant I had that explains my loathing of April as "The Cruellest Month":

(04/01/2011 08:01:51 AM) unwitting friend:
why april?
(04/01/2011 08:09:10 AM) Palmer:
as i just quoted on mah twitter...
(04/01/2011 08:09:53 AM) Palmer:
"April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the deadland, Mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain."
(04/01/2011 08:10:34 AM) Palmer:
it's when people's hormones get reawakened, all those lovely flowers and cherry blossoms start coming back, and everyone wants to go out into the world and display their coupling might
(04/01/2011 08:11:17 AM) Palmer:
and on other days it's rainy and dreary, giving me time to remember & sulk about how, unlike everyone else it seems, I'm *never* coupled with someone so happily & hornily
(04/01/2011 08:11:35 AM) Palmer:
it's like life is rubbing it in my face, my loneliness.
(04/01/2011 08:12:00 AM) Palmer:
my loneliness and their happiness

I don't mean to sound monster-emo, but that's just how it's always been. I never get to spend my April with someone, share legitimate companionship with someone I care about. Nevermind get to work out all those damn raging hormones.

I will admit there was one April I was in a relationship/seeing someone. That was April '06, when Mani and I were still together. That was our last month together; he broke up with me that May. It was a weird, somewhat strained, confusing part of our relationship, not helped by other frustrations of April.

It's more than hormones, I want to establish. It's also somewhat more than just a longing for companionship, someone to share the blooming Spring and rekindled energy & love of life with.

I don't know what that other thing/element/aspect is. I only think it's there because of how I feel. It's more than just frustrated or lonely or horny or unfulfilled. It's all of those things, too, so it's hard to say what the other is. It may just be some subtly existential worry.

Whatever it is, it buggers me and is unsatisfied. Every goddamn April. An unknowable, embittered malaise settles over me; I succumb to a foregone ennui--learned from years of the same old disappointment and lonesomeness and hurtings brought to a month-long, especially pointed reminder. It's like, all of a sudden I remember it--the urge to find and meet and couple and form happiness--and cannot shake it--the grim realities that it never works out, that all I find are endless let-downs and imploding expectations.

And it sucks. But that's my April. And I've endured it before, if gloomily; watched the happiness of others, if resentfully; and survived. I'll be okay, just don't start wondering wherefores if you see me frowning.

Hopefully, I can capture all or some of this in that poem I'm writing. We'll have to see, and try.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Or just tell me what you think.

Other things that might interest you...

On aging, and fear.

To begin with, I’m not sure you’re aware of it, but I’m middle aged. Oh? What gave it away? Using a blog as my primary literary medium?¹ Hm. But in fact, the APA defines 35 years as the end of “young adulthood.” Yeah. I found out via some shitpost on twitter when I was already 35, so it didn’t sit well with me then either. But my worries about aging began much sooner than that. See, even in my 20s, I feared I’d been wasting my life. I’d struggled with school and life and everything since graduating high school, arguably sooner, and nothing seemed to be going anywhere meaningful . I felt I had a limited social life, a dead-end job, no money, no great travels, a limping love life; I was, generally, a loser, wasting away... There were none of the usual hallmarks of success or happiness. And that scared me. Would my life have been worth it if I continued in this direction? Would it have been a “life well lived” by the end? So, this is my existential struggle. Even now, as I lurch ever nea...
Post a Comment
Read more

Changing lanes.

I was driving home in some traffic last night when I drifted, in my mind, a long way back (about 20 years) to high school. I was caught in one of those periodic traffic slowdowns as I floated back; you know, those waves of congestion that seem to pass backward through the columns of cars in each lane. (I've heard they start because someone switches lanes, and in response, a rippling emergent slowness travels backward and outward as the cars behind it accommodate the change, one by one.) What drew me back to those younger days was that, back in high school, similar phenomena of congestion took place in the halls between classes, when eddies of young humans would get caught in and around those clumps of those chatting by lockers or retrieving books. Occasionally, backups would occur when groups of people got caught in these eddies, or collided with other groups by the lockers, and slowdowns would ripple back from there. Maybe it's not exactly the same, but as I drove it seemed si...
Post a Comment
Read more

Oatmeal is tasty.

{slurps up berry-oatmeal-deliciousness} Indeed. I need to work on rebuilding a morning schedule. I can be zombie-like enough that I'll waste a perfectly good morning, and have often slept through many. And, really, it's such a useful time of day.
4 comments
Read more