The First Signs of Spring

Day 119 – March 22, 2026

Something in the air felt different today. Not in the dramatic, movie trailer way where the season changes and suddenly everyone is reborn in flattering light with an acoustic soundtrack and emotional closure.

I mean subtly.

The kind of shift you almost miss if you aren’t paying attention, which, unfortunately for the universe, I usually am.

The light looked different. Softer, but somehow sharper too. The kind of light that doesn’t just illuminate things. It reveals them. The trees still looked undecided. The air still had a little bite in it. Winter hasn’t fully packed its things yet. It’s still lurking around like an ex who swears they’re “just grabbing the last of their stuff” while emotionally haunting the hallway.

But still. Something is changing. And I could feel it in myself too, which is maybe what got me.

Because I think I’ve been living in an internal winter for longer than one season. Not metaphorically in some precious, over curated way. The slowed down kind. The stripped down kind. The kind where life gets quieter because it has to. Where the body is doing invisible work. Where survival, grief, anger, fear, and all the other messy little roommates move in and start rearranging your idea of what a day is for.

Winter has been real to me. Not just outside the window. Inside the body. Inside the mind. Inside the life.

And now I’m standing at the edge of spring feeling not healed, not transformed, not wrapped in some smug little lesson. Just aware. Aware that something in me is thawing in places I had stopped checking.

That’s strange. And a little scary, honestly.

Because winter has its own logic. Its own brutal elegance. It asks less of you socially. You’re allowed to be quieter there. Allowed to retreat. Allowed to survive on candles, coffee, inwardness, and the occasional emotional collapse in privacy. Spring, on the other hand, starts asking questions.

Are you coming back out? Are you ready to want things again? Are you ready to be seen in brighter light? Are you ready to stop calling your solitude healing if some of it is fear in a silk robe?

Rude. Valid. But rude.

I don’t have all the answers yet. I just know I felt something today. Some tiny internal turning. Some almost imperceptible willingness to lift my face toward what’s next without immediately expecting it to bite.

That matters.

Roger, for his part, has already entered spring like a man with no trauma and excellent boundaries. Today he ran outside with the enthusiasm of a creature who believes the earth itself has personally reopened for his enjoyment. Honestly, icon behavior.

There is something beautiful about his certainty. His complete faith that life is still worth meeting at full speed, with his whole ridiculous body, no notes, no hesitation, no memoir about the emotional significance of grass.

Meanwhile I’m over here making metaphysics out of daylight.

But maybe that’s the mood now. Not rebirth. Not reset. Just the first signs. The earliest evidence. The little glimmers that say the frozen parts are not dead. They were waiting. And waiting, however romantic people try to make it sound, is still work.

So yes. Today felt different. Not because everything changed. Because something is beginning to.

Chaos in one hand. Grace in the other.

And the first signs of spring finding me still here, still watching, still just dangerous enough to bloom properly.