I think I am in love with September.
I think I’ve escaped the inescapable, attained the unattainable, and broken the unbreakable.
I think my love is, for once, requited. And even reciprocated, maybe.
Everywhere I look, the absence of gray enthralls me; while I am buried in leaves, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
I dove into the pile head-first, and I still can’t quite tell if I’m concussed or if the world is just spinning faster. Either way, I feel okay.
Nowhere is safe, and nowhere is comforting, but within this sharp, scathing realm, I have been forced to thrive. And I’m—finally—learning that faltering means I’m doing something right.
September and I have become close. She confesses to me the high expectations placed on her, and I confide that I contributed heavily.
When I cry and when I laugh, I see leaves fluttering in the air like a friendly tornado just outside the nearest window—and I know she’s listening.
Lately, I’ve been speaking too loudly and out of turn, but it’s only because I’m forgetting the peace of tranquility. Rather than floating or flying, I’m drowning and dying, and in the final gasp for air, September whispers in my ear, “Let go.”
I am not overwhelmed; I am overflowing.
It’s haunting how much life there is left in me to live—to give to something, to somewhere, to someone.
There’s a graveyard of the unchosen whose ghosts follow behind me like shadows, and all I feel for the phantoms of my prospects is sorrow. Their wails are the score to my nightmares, but if I lay dead like all of them, I would mourn myself loudly, too.
Words and ideas and thoughts and dreams are spilling out of my fingertips faster than the figs are falling from the tree I sit under, shaded from the scorn and scorch.
September is the shade, the cloak of cool preventing the sun’s blush from spreading farther upon my skin. In her embrace, everything is just a little less frightening, a little less haunting.
Somehow, when I sit in the shade, or when a yellowing, changing tree is pointed out to me, or when the wind whispers in my ear, I am suddenly fine.
This month has been full of sickness, yawning, and tears, and I do not yet know if I’m better for it.
Maybe the sunset, pumpkin orange of October will finally provide clarity on the bemusing, deep yellow of September. In the blur of the ombré, I hope my blue mornings fade. They are the only color of September that I have, illicitly, yet explicitly, hated.
The path ahead, with trodden leaves, snapped twigs, and other broken-down, natural constants, is changing before my own eyes. Morphing into something seraphic, something whole, something September-esque.
October is eventful, which is too often mistaken for beautiful.
It’s a matter of opinion: the calm or the storm?
To find the delicate beauty of the calm is not simple, but I’m doing my best, and September has had grace since.
