Tag: Autumn

The leaves are changing now. I’ve seen them turn so many rounds, but I’m still pulled apart by them. It reminds me of feeling discarded into the gust that picks up to a wind, blowing harshly through all armour. To some people I have burnt orange and crisped and brittled so far that only the limp sweep of a current very slight is enough to pluck me pathetically from their branching life. I was about to say that this is something we all must go through, but I’m feeling less and less equipped to speak on any behalf larger than my own. When I label an experience as something universal, I tend to think I’m doing it out of humility, trying to tell the void that I don’t think I’m special. But I do feel I’m special. Even though intellectually I disapprove, this feeling drifts like incense into a lot of places it has no business. Colouring the air. So who is it for when I say everyone goes through a certain tough thing I’m living in? Well it’s for me, I guess. To make me feel better when I’m feeling hurt by truths and facts, becoming emotionally churned up by their emotionless lack of leeway. It’s an adult trying to ease a child’s pain at a lost toy by explaining that loss is part of life. The kid continues to cry.

The churning river in October rose high from swallowed downpour. Short banks of tall, framing tree lines. The sun breaks the sky open and the gradients of leaves glow between green and red spectrums, alive and dead spectrums. Grey water rushes teal at the edges, a petrol coloured surface crust draped onto wriggling depthless murk. It looks cold but feels warm. This is the tension of autumn. I want to save this feeling, but I know I can’t. October becomes more and more unreliable as the days flicker past, but I can’t help but figure that that’s what deepens the beauty of these picturesque minutes. The tired sun thrown sideways over scenes and settings, growing more weathered and trodden each afternoon. The summer signals now stretched and broken up to reach us as we drift closer to the edge of their range. Our sky picks them up in shorter and shorter windows of reception. And with interference mounting in titanic banks of swirling clouds that loom in the distance, it is hard not to remain aware that this comforting texture might, by its very nature, be making its last appearance until the spring. Every time the landscape observes this subtle harmony between overtones and undertones, red and green, warm and cool, light and dark, ease and difficulty, long and short, sweet and bitter, fresh and expiring, free and held, it fills the air with a sense of quiet motion to set our lives against. Life doesn’t seem right when it stands still, and so the currents created by nature can feel so immensely reassuring to follow in the wake of. But the duality of following a transition is that it can’t last, and my brain stalls in paradoxical betrayal. I want the sense of things changing to stay the same, the feeling of velocity to pause still. I want to preserve for myself the sense of perfect balance, accidentally created, exactly halfway through the steady shifting of enormous, season sized weights across the threshold of a scale. But it is only temporary, and I can never suck enough of it up into the canister of a memory to really take it with me anywhere else. That feeling exists only while my gaze can rest here. I love it. It is disappointing. It is beautiful. It is over.

Spending all day cruising in tight circuits around the same five rooms of an end terrace is easy to fall into. If the whole day is off, then why can’t you open a window in your schedule? Nothing is decided yet, except that there isn’t room because of all the things we’re gonna decide on. I know it’s nonsense and that the fresh air will help me with whatever. Every day to work and back, stretching springy legs. Your body is built to walk across continents chasing seasons. Your ancestors would want you to get out and stride the curbed clearings, even if they could never understand life in a place like this. Such a detailed place, made of uncountable angles and materials. Stepping over dry leaves fallen from still trees in neat front gardens left in wills to children on their way to primary schools on creaking scooters that scare cats vaulting behind recycling bins that are picked up on Saturday mornings but won’t take glass so in dehydrated daylight the headaches have to haul bitter bottles in sixes and twelves down to bottle banks near river banks joined by painted iron bridges crossed by drab logo’d vans driven by vests and hard hats resting clipboards on the warmed seats as they punch in codes and swipe keys to step on rubber boots into science fiction graveyards surrounded by three types of deterrent fencing that power the entire city’s shop windows left wastefully lit all through the imposing nights that hundreds of thousands of neatly compartmentalised unconscious bodies lay limp through before six alarms and two cups of coffee spill them out flooding the skinny pavements where we weave in relaxed chaos to avoid each other and the the puddles and the piling leaves.

Sick melody spins me out of the nothing. My arm throws a feeble arcing bat at the slippy screen to shut the plans of my hopeful former self. He thought I would be refreshed and ready, but he never remembered the feeling under warm covers skimming out of deep rest. The urge is to sink back under the surface tension, but a block stacks in my booting brain and a basic thought outputs that awake me does mostly make better decisions, and he can usually be trusted. So I tense my leg muscles and curl my toes, warming up the easier synapses before trying anything as complex as opening my locked eyelids. Once I’m ready, I have to lift and pull on them with more force than it will take to manoeuvre the whole rest of my heavy body from prone to standing. They roll open stiffly like shutter doors in winter, and the blurred murk blows in from the dark shapeless room.

You never notice how great your resting stomach always feels until it begins to ache. It’s easy to take good things for granted when for long unbroken stretches they are just literally granted to you without any real effort. Life is constant motion and we are always breaking a path through a jungle of decision trees and branching outcomes. At the start line we’re too young to understand, but after a short crawl we pick ourselves up to our feet and then we start to get it, the satisfaction of moving swiftly and easily. It feels good to propel ourselves through life’s motions with precision and efficiency. I wanna go fast and fluid, swim and carve elegantly across this existence as I eat as deeply as I can stomach into the sheerly terrifying amount of stuff there is to do. And there is a lot. Much more than the structural beams of your mind can support before they snap like twigs under your rushing feet. And so you have to keep it up, the speed, so that the G force keeps the door sealed. The draughty door to the untrustworthy regions of your brain that might be reckless enough to invite in the creeping figures. Paradoxes, voids, infinites. Villains and vampires that will infest and drain you with their undeniability. So you get good at moving fast, from places of fear and of hope, to see everything you deserve of being born. You get so good, and you go for so long that you gradually cease to notice. You are doing something as normal and mundane as hurtling through an obscene amount of life every day, and it feels kinda average. And just as the earth’s careful arc around the sun won’t feel so amazing until a moon-sized asteroid dislodges it and shoots us like a pool ball out into the frozen depths of deep space, you’ll never appreciate the astounding efficiency of your life’s velocity until it is broken. What I’m trying to say is that the pavements aren’t clear anymore. I never noticed how clean they were all through the summer. How free I could be to vary my path or to look around in any direction, soaking up the suburban details. Now my eyes are trained on the ground, scanning for urban rock pools of rain water and layered leaves that could conceal things I don’t want to rest my weight on. It costs me seconds to dodge these tiny avenues, leading to nothing worse than a damp sock or the fleeting horror of a slipped step. Denominations deep into the decimals of the day’s length, delays so small that they appear to bounce off me. And yet as they hit, it feels like my backpack has, from a secret compartment, deployed a parachute that catches their light push, dragging me as I attempt to navigate at a speed I didn’t know I was even going at until the resistance pulled me back from it. 

As the world gets darker and the bright portraits of each flickering day are hung in thicker and more imposingly dark frames, we slip into October. Maybe the most truly autumnal month, fighting off the dual fronts of both summer and winter equally, without the warm bias of September, or November’s cold pessimism. October holds my Grandfather’s birthday, only eleven days before my own. These dates are much closer than our relationship ever has been, and as I pull together a card to mail vastly north to his remote edge of Scotland, I wish I had more to write.

Some people don’t sleep so long. They can almost count the hours they spend under each night on one hand, maybe casually inspecting their nails at the same time, subtly multi-tasking so simply, with an almost brutal ease. How did they become so wise? How much more life have they been allowed to live? Maybe the air is more pure out on the beaches of a sleeping sea. Is there only a finite dimension of consciousness that we all draw from through the crowded days, that if you wait into the dispersing night gradually opens up? Or are we all issued a specific number of hours we can be alive for, and it is up to us to ration and space them out using sleep, or to binge being awake and burn through them rapidly? And if this is the case then are those that blast through them any less wise, or perhaps even more so? I don’t know, probably none at all. What I do know is that I am not one of them. As alluring as cashing in some extra life bucks on the side sounds, like the engine of my parent’s old Zafira, my brain becomes pretty unreliable when you let the fuel run down. It will coast on ok, but when it’s time to hit the gas on a slip road, or make a complex considered judgement in a brief opportunity, it’s gonna spit at you and die if you were stingy at the last rest stop.

And at last the dusk is combed gently into the sky’s crown. The evening that has been stalking behind the months progress, tonight ambushes to kill the soft sinking gradient. To extinguish our last dying comforts and put the light out of its misery. It is as mechanical and unmalicious as the natural laws it is designed to offset. I cannot hate it and I cannot blame it, there is only acceptance and dread. Tonight, the sorry neck of our kneeling day rests extended over the guillotine’s mantle. We tried so adamantly to stretch it out on the dungeon’s rack, but it wouldn’t surrender an inch, and so today it is the hard way. The blade will fall and the crowd will turn away and the crack-thump will echo from the walls, like the sound of an axe splitting firewood. Later, in the basement levels, the severed, shrunken head is pulled up by the hair, out of the tinged basket and sewn onto the reverse side of its limp owner. A gruesome perversion. It’s nice to wake up in the light for a couple more weeks, but at what cost? Back then, sunset was ducking a little deeper each day, but now we have kicked it in the back and it is crippled on the floor, dropping suddenly below the horizon of our duties in a painful jerking fall.