When I walked out my front door that morning, I didn’t know if it was early spring or late fall. 

The air was cool. The trees were bare. I looked out over the wide lawns that stretched from each neighbor’s identical house and down to our street. The grass had a dormant and wintry look – but was that winter coming, or going? 

Until that moment, I never realized that those two transitions could look so similar. 

Until that moment, I didn’t know it was possible for the human mind to lose its placeholder in the passage of time.

I was completely unmoored from time – adrift and searching for landmarks.

One year later, and the seasons have repeated their ceaseless cycle. I see the bare and leafless trees and the just-a-little-bit-green grass that isn’t growing taller, and I remember that moment where I spun in terrified timelessness.

Now I desperately need the reassurance of spring flowers. I seek them out, and stare in relief. Blossoms anchor me to the present time, and ward off the lurking memory of confusion.

—

Written in March 2015, on my son W’s 1st birthday; I experienced postpartum psychosis immediately after his birth in 2014.