Ella Peirce

I miss summer so, so much, yet fall has been beautiful in its own way.

Each October, I cross my fingers.

Nothing bad will happen, nobody will die, nothing bad will happen.

There’s a pattern in the leaves, etched into the quickly setting sun each night, a rhythm that I can’t quite discern. It’s probably the rhythm of transformation and change, but I feel no need to write you a sonnet about the changing leaves, as sincerely as I might want to.

I want to give you my unique perspective, although I am just as bittersweet as all my peers, so it’s not that simple.

All I know at the moment is that it is finally fall, but I feel like my seasons are going in reverse. I am not becoming colder and sadder as the winter approaches, and the snow (hopefully) is not a motif for loss. 

I don’t want October to take anything away from me. I am holding on for dear life to the people around me and the euphoria of these autumn nights, to the songs that I’m feeling so deeply and the words I’ve been clutching. 

I’m hoping that if I give away my words, I’ll be spared.

This is my mantra for everything.

Maybe it’s a routine flare-up or an aftershock from my college essay, but it’s real nonetheless.

Whenever I’m driving home in the dark after hanging out with my friends, I think about how stereotypical of me it would be to get into a car crash. Or how it would be so cliché of me to get sick after I spend time in the cold outside. Or how this is the exact scenario where I would run into that one person. 

If I think it, it can’t happen. I’m not a prophet, but I am a preventer. I let go of my thoughts in an honest attempt to hold onto the things I love.

I don’t want anything to change. Daring to write these words during autumn, the season of change, is a death wish, but they are too true to keep inside.

Summer is gone, but I can still feel it dangling in the air. I essentially believed I would never see my friends the day school started, and since I’ve been proven wrong, I don’t know how to act. Summer’s perfection has left me scared, waiting for the storm to disrupt the calm.

Is there supposed to be a part of me wondering if there’s no storm?

This is the one possibility I never considered, the one thing I didn’t bother to let cross my mind. Even now, as I manifest it in this column, no part of me believes in the words I’m writing. It’s performative, a function of natural flow rather than of real substance.

It still feels a little like summer, the way I don’t feel miserable quite yet.

My death grip on this feeling is strong. I love the cold weather; I love the busy days and their rehearsed cadence. I love the way life feels like a Lorde song, from the mini mirrorball in my car to the late-night hangouts to the recent ubiquity of my best friends.

I hate the feeling, the inkling, that it’ll be gone soon.