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I’ve heard it recently, the soft fall crickets. The lulling pulse of the cicadas is still there on warmer nights, but when the temperatures don a little chill at night, I hear the promise, the certainty, the finality of change.
Someone at work asked me what my favorite season is, and I replied that I didn’t have one—all the seasons have things I love. He said, “but there’s something about fall….” And the more I think on it, the more I have to agree.
A good number of years of my life were set to the academic calendar—August a swell of activity from summer’s indulgent lethargy. New clothes for school, precious crisp notebooks, a swill of anxiety and excitement for what the year would ask of me. It was the season of high school football games, of the thick, heady warmth of the wrestling gym, of red cheeks and breathlessness. It’s also a season, for me, so marked by longing.
The season is almost at an end, and I didn’t eat a single peach this summer. Sure, we’ll have some more 90º days, but the sun’s wingspan doesn’t lie. If I’m sticking to technicality, the herald of fall is the summer equinox, as we lose a couple breaths of light at the end of each subsequent day. Sometimes sweetness seems so brief on the tongue but lingers in memory.
I guess in my youth, seasons meant more. School, breaks, holidays, times to gather. Markers that followed the sun. Now, there is work, followed by more work, by more work. There are vacations if you’re lucky. Or at least some time off. But the gathering, for me, doesn’t happen like it used to for many reasons, and maybe that’s another post. Suffice to say for now that the grandeur of occasion feels lost to me, relegated to the fickle halls of memory.
Time runs together so much for me, it’s hard to step back and put a dam in it, as it were. But I know I am missing something that feels foundational when I do not create markers of time, when I do not make my own occasions, when I do not acknowledge and celebrate and appreciate the passing of time with others.
Maybe this is why I long. Why today and these cool nights I am thinking of places and people who no longer exist. I’m trying to curl up into the warmth of the past, what I loved but never realized just how dead those days would be. And they are, dead. I have the music, some of the things, too many memories, but it’s all an echo. I don’t know that I’d willingly go back even if I could. But maybe it is that time felt different then. I had time to live still. I had people around me sharing my experience. We had things to look forward to—our lives. Now I’m in the thick of living, and sometimes it’s like a dry sandwich. Hard to swallow. Hard to stomach who I am or what I’m doing. Choices that I alone made or was forced into by the world.
Even my writing, the thing I did the most in my life, evaporated in my adulthood. I had to bring it forth once more like a child, screaming and confused. And now it’s the end of August, and once again I’m sitting at my desk late at night, doing some kind of work. Like so many Augusts before. There will be no Friday night lights, no mouthful of humid gym air for me this time. I miss the kind of longing that had an end—desires that could be fulfilled. Now my desires are like the vines that cleave and wend around tree trunks. So twisted and tenacious I could not begin to pick them apart or tell where they begin or end. So I long for things without name and fall through this season and the next. And the next.