Allergic

Do you ever think you are allergic to happiness? I'm riding down Walnut today and it's just gorgeous. the trees are pink and white and veined with tender green, so fragile, you want to cry and glue the petals in place just to make them last forever. And the breeze as I biked lifted up my hair and cooled my shoulders even as my back muscles grew hot and loose. I went over the Schylkill River (god, will I ever learn to spell that???) and my thighs were burning and I wanted to stop but I didn't want to stop either. I could see the joggers on the river path below, the good ones with their reddened necks and legs and their even breathing and the ones that have just crept out from winter dens, weighed down by fat and sweatsuits, gasping and waving their arms as if drowning. Just walk, I want to tell them, and the thought of yelling it makes me laugh.

I am on my way to buy tickets to a klezmer concert, except this is tough girl, all drum klezmer. I'm going with my whole family on Mother's Day and Larry's family is joining us for dinner at my house before that. Hooray, no one hates me today (I don't think...). We are going to bring the babies to the playground and the petals will fall all around us and it will be like we're in one of those snow globes, but it'll be like a flower globe.

I think about being a mother. And a wife. And a student. And a daughter. And a writer. I could not be happier. To be in my body, to feel the sun pricking red upon my nose, to taste the film of chocolate left in my mouth, to rub my chapped (always chapped) lips together and feel like a movie star because I am on my bike, wearing the sunglasses with the rhinestones (even though some have fallen out). I want to do yoga. I want to swim. I want to read a magazine in the hot hot sun and drink ice tea and wear a straw hat. i want to hike in alaska. i want to creep through the decaying streets of Fez. I want to wear a djellaba. I want a dog.

And just like the petals, I want to glue this feeling in place. I will go home, I will get a parking ticket, my cat will get fleas, my ATM fee will suck, my library books will be late, Larry will put his dishes in the sink instead of the dishwasher, I will get bleach on my Saturday night jeans. And it will all be over. But I dont want it to be. So I keep riding.