from last fall

It’s funny how hard October tries to cling to summer.  September twenty-first—this is the last day of the season, officially.  Meanwhile, most of us ended our summers a month earlier.  While “carefree” or “relaxing” didn’t apply to most of our vacations, we still each, a little, wished the summer could last a bit longer.  Summer was different—summer had possibilities not-summer didn’t.  Summer jobs meant new people, new experiences, new responsibility; not-summer mean the same thing we, now seniors, had grown accustomed to over the last three years.  The same faces were always there—maybe with a few new ones here and there—maybe a few holding new significances—but still, similar, familiar faces you weren’t sure why you knew, but you knew just the same.  The same settings—backdrops for scenes that would change as circumstances and faces changed, but still had a hint of that old history.  September’s duty was to bring us back to this old stage, set with these backdrops, so that we could rearrange all of the characters, all of the faces, for this year’s installment of short stories.  Like the great writers we spend our legitimate hours reading and analyzing, our stories take on familiar patterns, as our personalities, ever-evolving but still growing out of the same root, lead us to make the decisions towards which our personalities would always guide us.  Each of our stories, though influenced by these new encounters we steal from the summer months, all have a faint hint of that sameness we claim we’re trying to evade.  We make mistakes we’ve made before; we’ve learned what we should and shouldn’t do and still too often gravitate towards that old behavior that makes us feel like us…

On the twenty-first of this particular September it was obvious that the day was aware of what its own date implicated; for the first time in several years, the sun, on the twenty-first, shone as thought it were trying to prove that the summer still endured, at least until midnight.  After that, people would be forced to call it “fall”, or “autumn”, if they were feeling particularly poetic.  Fall does have a negative ring to it—"fall" feels like the end of something.  Autumn seems to promise something new-ish, rather than just the time we use to mourn summer and pine for winter—autumn becomes its own season—one that highlights those in-between feelings that dominate these sheltered years in which we find ourselves caught at this particular moment in our lives.  Autumn is a part of nature, which makes our own fluctuating season feel more acceptable and endurable.  But don’t tell that to October.  Sitting outside on a mid-fall afternoon, you can feel October’s jealousy—a month that only gets to feel special on its very last day. 

This year October has decided to cry for attention by trying to behave a bit more like August.  The trees have stubbornly refused to change from their vibrant green and as a result, the water being tossed up on the rocks by a milder-than-usual mid-Atlantic breeze still shines with the brilliance of the woods up above it.  The wind itself is too lazy to change into the harsh autumn gusts it should be aware it is supposed to become.  Instead, it carries with it memories of the summer that was supposed to end a month earlier.  We can even feel a hint of some scenes and scents of summers from the past.  We don’t remember why these summers hold such good memories—I can’t place any particular moment or event—we just believe, because it was summer, that they must have existed.  I am surprised at how easy this setting can allow my mind to rest easy for the moment.  The radio perched carefully on a river rock, doesn’t seem to distract from Capote's prose, which are unfolding out of my little hands.  Instead, the lyrics seem to catch that rogue part of my mind that would otherwise wander to the distracting topics I’ve been trying to evade during this mini-vacation—the kind of thoughts that always seem to accompany September’s intrusion and autumn’s long reality.  Annoyed, I find my choice of beverage has proven more distracting than the sum of the entire serene setting we’ve carefully and unconsciously constructed and though, on vacation from the sameness I’ve been trying, with this pseudo-October-summer, to escape, my thoughts can’t help but turn back towards those I’ve been trying hardest to forget.  This Indian summer is shattered by memories unwillingly resurfaced through  the drowsy buzz of an amber ale.  I open my mouth to meditate on the one thing I want to get out of my mind’s daily repertoire, but close it again, thinking that, as long as I keep it inside, it’s not real and can’t hurt. 

Summer, you say?  Even real summer, that pre-September summer, is just a temporary fix—life is always waiting—just ask September twenty-first. 

worth the $.99 on itunes: "in the aeroplane over the sea" by neutral milk hotel.