This is my favorite time of year, these very early moments of spring.
Seasons don't follow a calendar here in the South. Plants don't check the date to see if they're supposed to bloom. So even though the vernal equinox won't happen for a few more days, spring has sprung in my world.
The daffodils come first, often in late January. We've had a snowier and icier winter than normal this year, but it hasn't seem to have deterred the first shoots and fresh buds from reaching for the sunlight. Every year, there are a few warm days followed by a few cold and then the first of the spring rains. As soon as the clouds clear but before anything has dried, my world is suddenly verdant. The lingering droplets refract the differently-angled sunlight, and everything is green and fresh in a way that makes my heart swell into its own brilliant smile.
It is the return of Perstephanie.
What started as an inside joke with Moonshine more than twenty years ago has become the moniker of a persona. Major life events always seem to happen for me around the first of March and the first of October, as the world is gearing respectively up and down for seasonal change—during the procession of Persephone from and to the Underworld. And even though the time around Valentine's Day is often cursed with chaos for me, I always know it is on the cusp of rebirth.
It's always darkest before the dawn.
This year, I have been lucky enough to have a significant paradigm shift with the return of lengthening daylight.
It came in the guise of a man, Rex. At this point, I am choosing to keep details about him and that relationship within the confines of the tightest of the Inner Circle. What will happen between us remains to be seen, but suffice it to say that he is the catalyst for a significant shift in my energy.
As has happened before, there was a bolt of lightning. Again, I am turned to face a man who is a reflection of me in this place and time—simultaneously similar and opposite. My current story is reminiscent of his past. Our neuroses and demeanors are so eerily alike that he commented that I'm him with expensive lady parts.
Yeah. He's me with a penis.
But he has experiences that I don't, as well as a male perspective that I will never be able to gain.
He came with brash admonitions to take the things that taunt me, the vices of my self-flagellation, and to put a fence around them, to keep them safely unable to harm me but close enough that I can keep an eye on them when I so choose. He brought the gentle reminder not to overthink anything and everything at any and every given moment. And he brought living proof that a single mom of two handfuls of young men can be a successful parent, even in the face of utter familial turmoil.
Rex is one of those people who are brought into my life to teach me something. Maybe a lot of something. I'm almost certain I have something to show him, as well.
But even if he were to be gone from my life tomorrow, he gave me this little gift of a tool to be able to slow my own head down, not to have to rely on someone else to bring me back to the ground when I glide too close to the sun. And when it happened, the shift and exchange of energy was so palpable that we both were physically moved and could touch it in that wondrous moment.
The spring storms will be here soon. I'm a little anxious about what that lightning brings with it. But where I felt trapped and unable to move forward just a few weeks ago, I am lighter and freer than I have been in months. Still stumbling along my path, I'm being rebirthed. Again. And I'm skipping my way into my spring.
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