The body expects continuity; the world only offers succession.
Friends sometimes ask Russel if he rents out his car at night. It has too many miles on the odometer and hardly any untouched surface on the body. Without any explanation, he smiles and turns the conversation elsewhere.
Once, when his daughter was still small enough for a car seat, they were pulling out of a grocery store parking lot when she said, without preface, “Oh, I love the spring.” She said it like a fact, not an opinion, as if the season were something the world was obliged to provide. Outside the window, trees wore the first, blunt green of new leaves.
Streets unrolled for Russel like patient, green-lined hallways. The lane markers, the store awnings, even the cracked curb at the corner repeated with a loyalty almost ceremonial. The world met the vehicle halfway, offering the same mild wind through the window gap, the same yellow of daffodils, the same reliable angle of light on the dashboard.
He has not stood inside the spring she loved since she moved north, into a different arrangement of weather and light. Now the seasons arrive a little late or a little wrong– as if translated by someone who never learned the language natively.
Many years ago, one afternoon, Russel unbolted the seat and carried it into the garage, setting it down among boxes he meant to sort through someday. The air there had once been crowded with snack crumbs, picture books, the gravity of a small mind discovering seasons. Now it lay blank and spacious, as if waiting for instructions that no one intended to give.
Joints kept count. Muscles renegotiated with gravity. Acceleration no longer felt entirely like a response to his foot. At times it seemed to belong to the road itself, to a world that had taken on a sharper angle. Even when he held the pedal steady, the sensation of descent remained.
Late in the day, Russel pulls over to take a call he has been waiting on. When the screen goes dark, a reminder for tomorrow slides into view: a time, a place, a brief instruction. He opens the calendar and registers tomorrow’s obligation instantly. Only then does he notice the small words at the top of the screen: last day of spring. He had not noticed it arrived. He had not noticed it was already leaving.