Circles
My heavy eyes trace dizzying circles around my ceiling fan. If I muster all of my concentration on a single blade, it's as if I can control its motion. Though I understand it's all just a silly trick of the eye, and ultimately I am the one under its hypnotic control.
I can never quite escape the cyclical nature of life. I ponder sinking into my broken twin bed in the dark of my claustrophobic dorm room. I reminisce on the last days of southern california sunshine I will experience before I will return to my home in Michigan for the summer. For the first time in 18 years I escaped the midwest winter.
Or so I had thought.
Leaving in august and returning in june seemed like the dream I had ached for since I could remember. The drastic shift of the seasons had been etched into my body for years, so much so that I felt the mild seasons of SoCal could not quite understand me. I was running on a different sort of rhythm, that circular spin that ran wheels and turned engines was innately different in my wiring. I first noticed it in the slowness of pace and shallow stride of Californians walking to their destination. No sense of urgency to gather acorns for the impending winter frost. I will forever be haunted by the inevitable pain that follows sunny skies. The gilded dream of California sunshine seemed tarnished as I dissected the memories of the midwest cycle that rounded me into the person I am today.
The softness of the California seasons never forces lost dreamers to wake from their slumber. I think of it as gentle parenting that raises children without proper social cues. The needed reality check that adaptation is necessary in order for survival. Michigan’s unforgiving cycle of seasons rebirths populations of perseverance, with the mental endurance to wait out months scarce of vitamin D whilst not begging to be lobotomized. Though even the strongest may entertain the idea of it once or twice.
The homelessness population in Detroit is wiped out by hypothermia and disease each winter. Survival is not an option once the cycle has reached the cusp of sub zero. Passing by bodies slightly thawed to maintain life is a reminder of her unforgiving cycle. There is no getting by, only getting better in these circumstances. Life or death, black or white.
I think of the homelessness in California, their flesh rotting in the baking sun. Skin rough like leather draped from bones satisfied with a tolerable situation. The entrancing sunshine distracts its host as they are cooked from the inside out. Warm enough to sleep outside, they never quite needed a reason to look elsewhere, and society never quite found a reason to help. Linear seasons, tolerable situations, succumb to stagnation.
Californians smoke weed like they are inhaling the life force of creation or something. A year round treat that takes the edge off of the day or inspires immaculate conception. It's a constructive tool to enjoy the linear life that passes through them. In Michigan, drugs and alcohol had one deconstructive purpose for those I knew: to numb.
The cyclical winter depression approached the midwest around November each year, when trees stripped of life echoed back the same hopelessness of people trapped in homes. Comfort was reliably present in a bottle, the warmth of drunk rosey cheeks and the slight killing of thermoreceptors. Where we lacked vitamin d, winter substituted substance abuse.
I remember being convinced to tripsit my friend on shrooms. Though I suggested we waited until summer to take them, she insisted upon needing a change now. I complied as we drove around the lifeless stripmalls and concrete streets blanketed by snow. The backseat of my car went silent, I quickly flicked my head back as I pulled over to address the situation.
Caught in a thought loop, she anxiously gripped her bangs between her tense fingers repeating in a broken pant of phrases,
“We are all just little people. Just little people in this little people world. We need to get out. Just little people. Doing little things. Does any of it matter?”
I sat with her for about an hour, trying to regulate her breathing and bring her out of her mind. But the cyclical hypnosis that possessed her was a stronger force than I imagined. Something so captivating about a spiral is that you can never fully see the end of it, just a continuous spin of curves that you eventually forgot began in the first place. That's how those winters consumed us. The only way through them was to become inebriated enough to accept the ebb and flow of the greater power.
About a mile away from my home in Michigan, there lies a circular track hugging the circumference of a mercky man-made lake. Everyday without failure, I would lace up my tennis shoes and force myself to jog 8 laps, and sprint the last 4. There was comfort in those even numbers for me as I would come around the bend of the track completing a lap. The odd number of laps I'd imagine 10 pounds of weight on my back so I'd deserve gliding through the even numbers with ease. In every protestant’s upbringing there is the mindset of tolerating the pain, and being better for it. I suppose this very balance is what kept the seasons moving and my body around the track.
My strides across the track would strike the concrete emanating summer heat, fall leaves, winter snow and occasionally flower buds of spring. Every lap I showed up a different person. Going somewhere yet nowhere all at once. Around and around in the stationary radius of cement, praying for change when I was constantly the victim of it.
I run through canyons and trails in San Diego, taking in the beauty of the bounious mountains and candy colored wildflowers sweetly decorating the dry land. I finally feel as if I am going somewhere, but my mind hopelessly returns to its roots. Suspicious of the soft bend that I cannot quite perceive, slowly circling me back to the cyclical nature integrated within everything. Where I arrive is never the beginning nor the end, just more and more circles spiraling into the depth of the unknown.
I cannot help but feel myself treading on a hamster wheel here in California. Blindly running my guts out to beat the impending doom of winter trailing behind me. They say it will never be the same as midwest winters, but I am forever haunted by the curvature of circles and cycles that never end. Perhaps I am stronger for the endurance I was trained to develop all of those years. I comfort myself with the lie that I am better off for knowing the truth of the harshities of winter, to better appreciate the beauty of summer sunshine. Yet Californians only know the sunkissed glory of mild seasons and turned out seemingly fine, so what do I know?
