My blurry autumn is vague nowadays.
I try to discern as much of its vestige as I can. There is an indefinite light, I am certain of it. It is framed by the paradox of a solid edge and an arbitrary memory whose impulse lies incised in my head. I cannot find the impetus for its persistence, but its residual linger is nevertheless greeted with a hospitable welcome.
Nowadays, I wipe the fog off the lens of my capricious memory and search the impermanent oasis—the film reel of my youth that I wander back to every now and then.
I inhale the scent of fall, which spewed from piles of raked, red-rust leaves and the faded musk of cinnamon and spice. Nestled in the corner of the crowded room lies the hum of a kiddish clangor, the bones of their existence chilled by crisp October. As the flood of shrill pitch in my ears begins to drain away, I can hear the callow conversation of the other children, teeming with festivities and surfeited with spirit. Decorating the walls of my classroom lay ill-fitting ensembles of crayons and markers, rimming the periphery with paper turkeys, ghosts, and ghouls that waved back in equal substitution.
Not yet a subject of duress or ignominy, I had not branded my bedraggled artwork with its rightful damningly sloppy nature, but rather, I was thankful for the circumstance of its botched and blossoming conception. I knew only one truth about it, and that was the purity of my pride.
It was, as cliche as it may sound, perfectly imperfect.
The days were filled with poetry, blooming with a solemn grace I could not yet comprehend. The world demanded to move, soft but poignant. Everything that once was at that point was lighter in its precession, yet holding the fateful foreshadowing of the weight to come.
Many falls have passed since I was that young.
In some cruel irony, my hazy autumnal days sit on each side of the scale, both in avoirdupois harmony. I can now observe its rapture and its ruin, its decay eclipsed by the promise of growth.
It is an unsparing dichotomy whose rounded edges I cannot grapple with.
Perhaps it is time that has hardened me, but regardless, my conscience yearns for the permanence of a simple cut-and-paste life, pleading the unpretentious step-by-step to keep every path in a straight line. Consistent, predictable, and irrevocably constant.
Yet somewhere inside of me, I hope this is not my fated truth.
I would like to imagine that when all is said and done—the rise, the fall, and everything in between—I will be satisfied whether or not it is structured; I pine, however piercing it may be, to accept the rigorous honesty and truth of a five-year-old’s tangled arts and crafts project and the inconceivable apprehension she carried.
So, I say, let tomorrow be tomorrow. Let the torture and triumph of yesterday die with the sun. Let life work in all of its ways, and accept it.
For even something so seemingly fluctuating brims with the duality of love and all of its colors, all of its forms, and all of its ways—with every formidable ending, both near and far, both riddled and free, comes a coincident dawn.
