And now we have arrived at my least favorite season, “grey days.” The six week period of disturbingly colored street slush. I trek to campus carefully to avoid the piles of snow along the road margins that have seen far better days. The sky has been painfully dull for months now, but I know we have a few more weeks before the arrival of spring.
You can feel the energy that the grey days bring, a certain melancholy associated with the in between. The magic associated with winter is long gone; what remains are tensions pulling in opposite directions. Some cling to winter, it’s easier to stay inside and know that you aren’t missing the world. When it gets dark before seven, you can pretend to ignore the things you are avoiding. It is easier to say no, and there is comfort in that. But as the daylight creeps a few minutes closer every day, there is a mixture of anxiety and excitement battling to take the center stage.
When the sun comes out, we see each other more, we wear less clothing, life tends to “lay us out to dry,” everything moves faster; the sentiment of “I’ll worry about that come spring” haunts your mind as you wonder if it is really time to figure out that summer internship, or dare I say your life plan. The arrival of spring speeds up life, and the end of the semester comes tumbling at you at speeds you believed were impossible — you thought you had more time.
Some days, I beg for spring to come; I am ready for what’s next. I am lucky to have my post-grad plans figured out, and my remaining weeks here feel like the lingering epilogue of a story that has been finished. Other days, I mourn the fact that next year I will not see the spring goslings swimming in the fountain, and students lying out on the lawn on the first warm day.
I wonder if the 91 days until graduation will be substantive. Will I remember the last 90 or so days the most, or will my memories of college gravitate towards a certain year or chapter in my life? Can I be changed anymore? I have already changed so much. Sometimes I think of my first-year self and deem that persona incompatible with the life I have built. I think about decisions I made during other seasons of grey days, and the branches that have forked out to represent every version of my life. Is this regret? Almost never. It’s hard to regret decisions and even mistakes that have led to such an epilogue, brimming with content, but these are simply the things we must ponder during the grey days.
