The First Sunny Day

It is Tuesday, April 14th and I am sitting outside of the Cafe Nero adjacent to Boston’s Christian Science Building. I’ve always thought it odd how a seemingly random, if not sinister, organization has occupied an undeniably grand structure smack dab in the middle of Boston. It’s 76 degrees and you can sense a buzz in the undercurrants of the city, 673,458 people simultaneously coming out of winter on the very same day. And though Northeasterners insist on their love for seasons and the cold’s influence on “building grit,” I’ve seen more half smiles and bounce in steps than I have since early September. 

I have spent the past hour attempting to begin my final final paper— an analysis of communication habits and their effect on happiness and quality of life. As I’m jotting this down, I really wonder how accurate the research is that claims living in sunnier climates has no effect on happiness levels. Clearly whoever wrote that article never spent time in Boston on the first truly summery day of the season. Call it causation or correlation, there is a noticeable lack of car-honking for a Tuesday.

 It’s perhaps reminiscent of the calm before the storm, or the eye of a hurricane, whichever way you prefer to look at it. All those things that would typically irritate me are just rolling off my back. The ice in my large black cold brew melted almost immediately, rendering it an overpriced lukewarm brew (hah), but I am just so thrilled at the feel of the skin on my shoulders prickling with the beginnings of a burn that I don’t even mind. When I couldn’t find a singular hairtime in my somehow perpetually overweight handbag despite the hordes I’ve stolen from Soulcycle, I improvised with a straw chopstick (origin unknown) I found next to the gum wrappers and since-discontinued pennies. My messy bun is holding up just well enough to keep the hair off my overheated neck. And despite having 3 days left of class and 12 days until my college graduation, the looming threat of failure (or worse, unknown) had been drowned out by the music I loved in third grade playing through my headphones. 

On the first sunny day, life becomes a word you can’t help but long for. All the mistakes and forgetfulness and fear and uncertainty feels like the quick 5-minute “before” montage in a Rom-Com. Real life starts to feel like the other hour and a half, when I’m looking somehow intentional and glamorous despite my thrown together study outfit and chopstick in my hair. It’s the part where I think of graduation not as just the execution of my girlhood, but as the reward for something I’ve spent the better part of my life working towards. I get to stop learning about how to be a happier person and writing 15 pages in APA format and actually get to the living it part.

It’s probably my sun-drunk serotonin release talking, but I at least know that no matter what happens, every year will have a first sunny day, and with it the reminder that life is worth living.