Schmuckumentary

We are wearing March incorrectly.

The calendar insists on heat—
its old contract with sweat,
with shirts that cling by noon,
with afternoons that press softly
against the ribs.

Today arrives as a cold front
filed under the wrong century,
a breeze that does not belong
to this latitude.

Morning after morning,
the window is open
and nothing fights back.

Air enters without weight,
grazes the back of your neck,
slips under fabric
as if it has mistaken you
for tundra.

Even the light hesitates,
resting on surfaces,
unsure what kind of day
it has been permitted to become.

—

Above us,
progress entered the sky
and stayed long enough
to rewrite the conditions.

We have instructed the sky
in our exhaust,
shown it how to continue
past the point where it could stop.

The ocean rehearses our restlessness.
The wind practices our impatience.
Temperature learns to forget
and keeps forgetting.

—

And yet—

this is good.

Let me not pretend otherwise.

You feel it immediately:
the shoulders lowering,
breath arriving unforced.

You walk longer.
You do not look for shade.
The body
is not at war with the day.

A softness
we did not earn,

settling along the wrists,
behind the knees,
in the curve of the back
where heat should begin.

A kindness,
misdelivered—
and kept.
We enjoy the iced coffee.

—

Somewhere, a season missed its turn.
A flower is still brimming with nectar.
Flocks misremember their formation.

Which is where the terms collapse—

to admit that harm
does not arrive only as fire or flood,

that sometimes it comes as relief.

That we can live inside
the same error
that will later erase us.

That there are versions of ruin
we acclimate to—
open windows for,
plan around,
begin to miss.

—

If it were simple,
this would be unbearable.

We would step outside
and feel only indictment,
each cool gust a sentence,
each easy breath
an accusation we could not keep.

But we are not built
for that kind of clarity.

The body accepts first.
Meaning arrives later,
if at all.

We take what is given
even when we know
it has been taken from elsewhere.

We call it weather,
luck,
a good day.

—

Weeks from now,
the sun will remember its mandate.

The contract will reinstate
line by line.
Heat will return like policy—
impersonal,
difficult to argue with,
adjusted upward annually.

It will settle at the back of the neck,
under the arms,
across the spine—
finding every place
March has emptied.

The chill persists,
no longer a memory
but a system in the body:

that the world can be wrong
and stay that way
until it feels consistent,

that consequence can be tender,

that we can stand inside the evidence
of our own excess,
feel it fit,
and think—

this is nice.

—

For now,
March is not itself.

And neither are we,

standing inside this pattern,
knowing its source,
feeling it repeat through us,
accepting the fine print
with open windows,
with unguarded skin—

unable

or unwilling
to refuse it.