Other people have a season for flowers.
I had a season for waiting.
April meant: the email is coming.
Or it is not coming yet,
which is a different kind of coming,
the kind where the silence is its own sentence
and you read it every morning
alongside the other emails
pretending you are not reading it.
I got good at April.
I got good at the specific productivity of dread,
the way you clean things
when you are waiting for news,
the way work fills itself with more work
so the part of the mind that is waiting
has somewhere else to be.
The tulips came up anyway.
They always came up.
They did not wait for anyone’s decision
about whether they were qualified
to be tulips in this particular garden.
I noticed that.
Some Aprils that was the only thing I could learn
that felt like instruction.
The tulips. Their absolute commitment
to coming back
regardless.
Regardless.
I came back too.
Twenty-five Aprils.
Not regardless.
I knew what I was returning to.
I returned anyway
because the work was the work
and the students were already there
and the door was still open enough
to walk through.
But I noticed the tulips.
I want you to know I noticed them.
Abril tras abril. De todas formas, volví.
April after April. I came back anyway.
