Catharsis in April and May

Winter is not so tyrannical that it will stay forever. The sun begins to shine and April once again breathes new life.

It’s been eight months since my life has been handed to me on a broken plate, where I’ve picked at my dinner between its fractured shards trying to eat without the sharpness of reality cutting the inside of my throat. In a letter to Aurelia Plath, Sylvia writes, “In March I'll be rested, caught up and human.” But, March was dreary and there was no spring in sight and everything, it seems, happened at once—my childhood dog died as I watched the last edges of what I understood my life to be fray apart. I had cried every single day since Luna’s death and the grey afternoons stretched into another, insisting that winter would stay indefinitely. For a week, I drifted in and out of sleep in the corner of the living room, spine straightened against the hardwood floor, too stiff on my sides to curl up into a ball. I’ve been told, more often than not, that I’m too self-pitying, and in some respects, I’ve worried that maybe this is true. But some weeks later on the bus one morning, I was readin…