Today is the first day all winter I’ve been woken by the sun. Her fingers slipped between my hair and the tips of them grazed my lips as she washed her breath down my face. When the sun hits, I grow, and it’s a marvellous thing. But every other day she plays hide and seek from me, the cells in my skin double over in shock, my bones creak to ash and the colour in my face fades to grey.
When the sun is gone, I’m SAD. Seasonal Affective Disorder: it’s a thing that everyone claims to have, yet winter comes, and they go for runs and they hang out the washing and forget that they can live without the sun. I cannot live without her; I wouldn’t if I could. I’m a solar power panel and she’s feeding me straight from the teat, she’s making me stronger and bolder and brighter and more me. She’s letting me grow.
My dad calls me lazy and my mum calls me sad, although she means it in the way one would intend in the most common use of the word.
“We are not changing with the seasons,” my dad told me once. Only my face could be seen from under my doona as he spoke from the door of my room. “Go to school.”
They refuse to understand that the dark clouds that surface every winter are not just the ones in the sky. They come from all directions, these storms and their winds and their hail like cursed crystals, thrown at me when I’m down. They come to town and they cause havoc and only a few of us realise they’re here. Everyone lives through them, these wicked storms, but only a few of us see them. Monsters shaped like marshmallows, and beasts like rainy days. And so, I hide the only place I know where to. I burrow under the covers and I squeeze my lids shut tight, and I pretend I’m somewhere closer to the equator, somewhere the sun is not governed by seasonal change. Somewhere I am not governed by seasonal change.
When I make it to school, I feel physically sick. My maths teacher asks me why I’m late instead of asking me how I am.
“I’m fine.” I mistake her question and she mistakes my attitude. I’ve no energy to explain that I’ve no energy, and so a plea to leave me alone becomes sass that leaves me in lunchtime detention.
My friends do not understand, they just think they do. “Yeah. I feel like total shit in winter too. I’d so much prefer to be in bed with a hot chocolate than be at school.” It’s not the same, I don’t say, because the lack of energy I have to explain how different we are is the difference in itself. Only I can see this difference. Only I can see a lot of things in this storm of a shit hole school.
The career counsellor gathers all the year elevens into the hall after recess to run through us our future career options. They exclusively include university, and the best ones at that. No gap years, no vocational education, no jobs straight from high school. We’re children with no options but the best, and we’ve no idea what we’re doing.
I fall asleep for a bit somewhere in between law and engineering. It’s the snap of the weight of my head off the back of the chair that wakes me up, and the eyes of death I notice from my homeroom teacher that keeps me awake. This is what existing at a school that cares more about how many zeros are in your parents’ bank account than your wellbeing is like. It’s July, we’re almost half-way through winter, and not one single teacher has stopped me in the hallway to ask if these bags under my eyes are necessary. Instead, this army of middle-aged cardigan-wearing crusty old boomers are more likely to accuse me of carrying around a school-prohibited accessory.
“I’M TIRED,” I want to scream at my homeroom teacher. “Can’t you see I’m so fucking tired.” But I turn my attention back to the front and listen to the career counsellor try to convince us to sign on for a six-year course dissecting the insides of people’s small intestines.
The number 16 tram up Glenferrie Road after school is kind of like a scone. If you can get it just right, with jam and cream and before the final bell at the boys’ school down the road rings, it’s fantastic. But just a little bit before or just a little bit after, and that sweet spot is nothing more than the worst 30 minutes in hell. I’m pretty much the only kid from my all-girls school that catches this tram, whilst pretty much every kid from the boys’ school does. Between arm pits of boys and shouts of men, catching this tram at the wrong time normally has me wishing I am dead.
The greyness that blankets the way home from school only makes the journey all the more harrowing. But it’s the arrival to said home that is the most painful. Dodging questions of how was your day and can I get you something to eat and will you remember to take the bins out tonight from my mother is like dodging bullets from Neo in the Matrix.
However, for me, the consequences are more dire. I try to force out a good whilst I drop my schoolbag in the hall. I manage an I’m not hungry with my eyelids only half open, and I surrender an ok sure whatever when I’m halfway to my room. These questions must be met with answers of compliance, even if barely so, because the energy it takes to argue with my mother that my brother never takes the rubbish out is precious energy I need to safely escort my fragile self to my room.
When winter attempts to blanket every corner of my bedroom, I allow it. No amount of vitamin D pills and artificial sun lamps and fake-it-till-you-make it-smiles make the winter monsters run away. The run is mine alone, and it’s always from them, from winter, from everything that exists outside of my bed and outside of the confines of safety I’ve made for myself in this room.
The blinds remain open and I remain sad, and the winter sun only pokes her head out every couple of days or so just to remind me to hang in there. I am an animal in hibernation, a caterpillar condemned to a seasonal cocoon. There is no fighting nature, no fighting the science, and there is especially no fighting when my skin is this pale and my mood is this low. To grow, one must summon strength, one must create something more from the materials they have. To grow, one must use energy, and the biggest ball of energy at my disposal is one that refuses to allow me a taste.
And so I lay in my bed and I lay in my sadness and I let winter take over and the darkness win. Every year, every June through to August, there is a belief that threads through every day that this, this, will be forever. The sun will not come out tomorrow, I will not sing of my good fortune and brighter days; this, this, is forever. I will grow old but not strong, grey but not warm, I will weather and wilt and fade into the blues of my doona cover.
And every year, as August deepens to the days of the 20ths and then the 30ths and then, finally, the 31st, a soft yellow pokes its head through my window and whispers I’m just around the corner. Yellow and orange and the deepest reds of warmth begin their dance as the calendar clocks over to September, to spring and to smiles and to leaving my bed for the first time in forever.
As the greys fade away and are replaced with the entire spectrum of light, I wonder if what happened even happened. I pull back my doona to find my legs a little longer and my face a little thinner, because whilst my mind has refused to grow, refused to brace a world in which is dressed in only black funeral clothes for the middle quarter of every year, my body has missed the memo. I have grown taller, older, I have grown into my shoulders and grown out of my pyjamas. Whilst I tucked myself in goodnight and pretended the world stopped when I closed my eyes, my body never got the joke, never understood the game.
I swing my longer legs out of bed and they creak when I stand. I’m almost tempted to sit back down again, to pull the doona back up and wait until December, until definite summer. But from the corners of my windows, a squirm of sunlight sneaks through. It grabs me by the wrist and looks me square in the eyes. You’re ok now, it chants, refusing to not be believed. Everything is ok.
And because it’s the first time I’ve felt warmth in months, a warmth of yellow and of gold, of honey and of syrup, I have no choice but to believe it. I have no choice but to place one foot in front of the other, my pyjama pants now falling above my ankles when they used to graze the ground. One foot in front of the other, I brush my greasy hair from my face and rub the winter’s-long sleep crust from around my eyes. One foot in front of the other, out of my bed and out of my room, into a house that continued to hum despite one of its occupants asleep, a house always filled with life even if the girl upstairs couldn’t feel it.
These feet, these steps that they are taking, take me down the stairs and around the corner, pass the kitchen and through the back door. And by the time I can see the grass and the flowers and the symbolic bees buzzing between them, I’m skipping, I’m running. I’m moving faster than my body knows how to move, faster than it’s moved in months. My bare feet land on the grass, scoop serrated green between each toe. The dampness of the due from overnight, from over months and over seasons, licks the soles of my feet; it licks my soul.
And because today is the first day of spring, today is the first day of the rest of my life.
I will skip and I will run through wet grass and bees, and I will forget the sadness that has previously stolen all of this from me. I will forgive the darkness that had previously stolen all of me from this. Because I am happy and I am glad and I am warm, finally I am warm, and not from the down in my doona or the water bottle in my bed, but from a version of life I can tolerate, maybe even thrive in.
And so I live like this for almost nine months of the year, forgetting the sadness and the darkness that awaits me in that other three. It’s a fair price to pay to be able to feel something, to be able to grow. Because when the yellows and the oranges and all the deepest reds kiss my skin and freckle my face, I feel rich beyond whatever cost winter dares to charge me with.
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