The Spring Inside

It's finally beginning to feel like Spring here on campus. The bitter cold which makes you shiver and tuck your chin into the top of your coat on the way to lectures has mellowed, softened, rounded out into a wholesome clear-gold glow which gives a faint warmth to the yellow stone and studs the round looking-glass of the lake with winking diamonds. It is a tentative, early-year warmth;there's a vague fragility in the light. It seems to mirror me exactly.

It is almost a week since my breakdown in the room with the drawn blinds, the kitchen knife, bent paperclips, scissors, the cutting and the wretched crying, Byrd and Pergolesi the soundtrack to my misery. Almost a week since I was obsessively counting up all my tablets and calculating fatal doses- feeling myself wanting to yield to the terrible desire, inch by inch. I cancelled on my friends, clung to my boyfriend like a life-raft, went home for the weekend, trying to put it all out of my mind.

And to my immense surprise, it worked.

I expected to have to get my head down and plough through the week, but it seemed that good fortune was beginning to smile on me. Time passed in chunks of luck and silly little things that made me smile. Waking up beside someone special. Doing the presentation I'd been worrying about for so long- and not badly. Brave yellow buds sprouting on the banks behind the library. Chocolate-chunk cereal. Finding I actually liked- and understood- Borchert's 'Draußen vor der Tür'. A compliment, an extra-tight hug, the 'smoke and flame' artwork in the campus gallery. I traced the umber spirals and pinnacles and knew myself to be fully, wonderfully content.

And I am so desperate for it to last! I want so much to live the rest of my life like this, paving my way with little shining happinesses which smooth out the dirt and dust track so that I never stumble again.

Last night we went for a late-night walk. I grabbed your hand and, running, laughing, dragged you away to see the stars. You were so happy for me, and I loved you all the more for it, for standing beside me through the first trial our relationship had had to endure. When I was crying and spouting all sorts of self-pitying rubbish, you held me and stroked my hair until I got a grip- and then gave me a cookie. To be honest, I think that just about sums up how incredible you are.

Drinking in the ghost-lights of Bath and beyond, the hillside alight with a hundred thousand tiny fires, we ran through the grass until our jeans were soaked with dew and filled our pockets with stray golf balls, springing up from the darkness like improbable yellow eggs. Silly like kids, weak with laughter and brave with the silence all around us, we dropped them from the footbridge and watched them tumble down the slope and into the shadowed undergrowth. I leaned back against you, wanting to see your eyes, your lips.
"I love you," I said.
"I love you too."
Who could ever need anything more?

Of course I know that it's only the beginning. I know it better than anyone. I won't be surprised if my mood does a sudden nose-dive- I fully expect it to at some point. But for now, while it lasts, the best thing I can do is to enjoy it, savour it, while the sun is out and the scent of earth and growing is in the air, and to welcome the blessing of this inner spring.