Luis and I were on scooters, weaving through Salt Lake on our way to a tattoo convention. It was after my pre-birthday lunch. The sun was out. One of those days that feels like a gift after a long winter.
We passed a park, and I said it before I even thought about it.
“I turned 18 here.”
It’s just a park. Trees, benches, grass. Nothing that would tell you a seventeen-year-old once slept there. That he was kicked out and had nowhere else to go. That this stretch of ground holds some of the hardest months of my life.
I don’t talk about this much. I don’t revisit it. Luis knows that about me. So when I said it, he listened the way he does. Quiet. Present. No rush to fill the space. Tears filling his eyes. But with a grounded composure that holds the space I need to share. And then we kept riding. The sun was still out. Birds still chirping. The convention still ahead, and him next to me.
That’s the thing about being alive long enough. You can pass the place that almost broke you on the way to something good. You can hold both at the same time. The city doesn’t stop for your memory. And sometimes, neither do you.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about March.
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For years, March has been hard for me and I have always had explanations.
The liminality of the season. The tension between winter and spring. Mercury in retrograde. Some vague spiritual weight I couldn’t name. I’m sensitive to transitions, I told myself. I’m someone who feels the in-between.
All of that is true. None of it was the actual thing.
My psychiatrist asked me this year to pay attention. To lean into the seasonal shift and notice what came up. I expected something subtle. What I got was a scooter ride and a park, and the sudden, obvious truth I had been narrating around for a very long time.
March is hard because March is when the worst of it happened.
