Autumn
The problem with life is that it's so long. We live in a cyclical pattern of days, weeks, months, and years only to continue missing each passing season with a fervent longing.
I've been alive for sixteen years and there hasn’t been one summer, fall, winter, or spring that I have been okay with letting go because I know it will come again next year. It doesn’t matter that the seasons will return, only that time moves on even when you can’t. You relive the changing weather, seasonal aesthetic, and tailored music playlist time and time again, yet it’s never the same. There’s no cap on sentimentality and with each successive year more precious memories continue to be made, while you’re left to carry and mourn the growing lot of them as you live more life.
I think the seasons changing especially heightens that dread of time. You’re reminded, not just by your thoughts but by the glowing red leaves vivid in the crisp morning sky, that time is passing. Why is it that I can’t help but miss the hot glare and green innocence of summer when I see this? Or even the quiet white and glowing darkness of January?
“Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.”
- André Aciman,
Call Me By Your Name, 2007
That’s a quote from one of my favorite books. In a way it captures everything I feel and I’m glad somebody else before me could put it down into words because this line was the only thing I could think of halfway through writing all of this. It must get harder to carry the burden of remembering as you get older if time really does cause pain to grow stronger.
I feel like my life rewinds every season like one of those timers you use to watch your cake in the oven. RINGGGG!!!! A fresh season is upon us and the timer is set back to zero: begin again. Relive the biting cold of winter, the uncomfortable rococo nature of spring, sweltering hot waves of summer, and comforting shift from life to death in autumn. And when you’re done just reset to zero, turn the clock back and do it all again. It doesn’t really ever stop.
We take photos to memorialize the shell of what we felt in our peak but why is it that we can never reconjure that same bliss? Too often I forget about a photo I took during my most memorable days only to stumble upon it when scrolling too far up in my camera roll. The moments those photos attempt to capture are only alive in your mind and feel phony when you physically stare at them. They feel set-up, a plasticky image of what you really were because that photo isn’t that moment, it’s only the moment you glanced at the camera and clicked a tiny button.
These days I can’t seem to live in the moment because the world around me reminds me that I need to keep going and I can’t ponder on the past. It seems so easy to not do anything at all ever. It’s hard to be so aware sometimes.
I think it will get easier by the start of October. Then I’ll really be in the thick of autumn and the lingering summer heat won’t follow me into the winter. My memories will grow dull and I’ll think of them through a flat image becoming less saturated with the benign help of time.
