Spring Fever, or a Case of Restlessness

"It‘s just spring fever," he said, quite casually. She bristled with annoyance. She didn‘t like his instant diagnosis of her feelings. She didn‘t like the fact that he had labelled it a disease and then implied that she would soon be cured of it.

"Maybe it‘s healthy," she snapped back. "Maybe I don‘t want to get over it."

Later, thinking about it alone, she decided that he was probably right. It had been the kind of glorious day that favours spring fever the way a swamp favours malaria. It was a May day, and the guard that northerners wear to protect them from the physical awareness of winter had suddenly dropped like layers of clothing onto the floor.

Around her were littered all sorts of lumbering emotional accessories, as if they were the blankets, hats and mittens of winter life. She had the sort of fever that heightens sensibilities rather than thermometers.

The warm May breeze had sent goose bumps across her complacency, and satisfaction sprouted up like her new snap peas.

She felt free-floating discontent, an effect without an object. It wasn‘t the sort of discontent that comes justifiably when something is wrong. It came rather from an engorged sense of what might be. She was suffering a shy ache for the possible, the what next.

It occurred to her that people mourn for what might have been at three o‘clock in the morning. They long for what might-yet-be when this fever strikes.

It was ironic. It wasn‘t fair. People who survive the hostility of winter deserve some sort of peace in the spring, the languid pleasure that comes after resistance. They deserve to feel the ease of belonging in the universe, instead of battling it.

Instead they get spring fever. That great yawning want.

Was it just some cosmic joke, some cosmic reminder that life never quite lets you off the hook? Was it a mystical memo saying that surviving isn‘t enough, “just living” isn‘t a good enough reason for living?