Spring is nearly year. I do not have any big problems with Spring, except for for some hay-fever (pollen will kill me; stopping to smell the roses is fatal). However, this time that is sports-wise spring-training, March Madness, and school-wise nearly finals and spring break brings out something gloomy in me. I do not need to find outside sources of darkness; I have enough in me, thank you very much. In Autumn and then in Winter these dark eddies can flow and swirl in the long nighttime, which brings about a weird kind of comfort, but in Lent, and then Spring these recesses are filled with sunlight; sunlight that reveals the oiliness of my emotions, thus exposed they overflow, smudging golden neighbors. This is all kind of rebellious sounding in a purple sort of way.
To restate more directly, I hate the sunlight with Vampiric intensity. Impatiently I wait for sunset. I wear black because I want to. I have never felt at home in sun and earth bent colors, such as green, yellow and orange. The sunlight and its glare play with glasses, infant-like–grabbing and smashing what they don’t understand.
Though I will grudgingly accept the sunlight (I do this every year), and relish the summer, the baking days especially, I cling to the rain clouds and night with my grays and blacks. Sometimes I wear red, but that is something else entirely. (Colors for clothes should be like the ocean.) And if I entrance myself with something that is musically, visually, thematically dark–I do so to find solace (sunshine), as if I were talking with old friends. But people miss something glorious about the night. The summernight is wonderful with the sounds that emerge as I lie in my bed writing, and the nighttime in the Fall and Winter is like wrapping yourself in large blanket-snow-rain-clouds-they will all do. And now the clouds are lace that curtains a close-by home, occasionally sweeping back to proffer a glimpse of a beautiful girl.
As Lord Byron spoke with adoration for the nighttime so much better, as in his poem “She Walks in Beauty”
- I
She walks in beauty – like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellowed to the tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
- II
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress
Or softly lightens o’er her face –
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.
- III
And on that cheek and o’er that brow
So soft, so calm yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow
But tell of days in goodness spent
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent.
