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The Cold and the Dark

I keep banging on about it, but it's true.

Fall is here, as evidenced by the misty car windows, the wilted near-frozen plants, the evening dark that comes before you get home from work.

Fall, Autumn, the so-called season of change, of slow death and slow churn. The leaves change and fall from the trees after an explosion of yellows and reds, colors that every year I want to burn into my memory, and every year I forget how vivid they were the year before. The bitter tang of the crumpled, paper-thin leaves, with veins stiking out and throbbing for a nourishment that is no longer there.

Autumn is here and for some reason, it has me nervous.

I can't really remember the details of last Fall. When I think about it, I remember a broken heart and exhaustion. I recall feeding my past into the flames of the fireplaces, scooping out the grey sooty ashes with a staisfaction of knowing who I was and how I felt could never be found again. I remember the stress of the upcoming job cuts from Company X, wondering if my head was on the chopping block (which it was), and the unmitigated apathy I felt wandering the hallways of work, my boots softly chipping at the floor as I walked. I remember endless days of wondering who I was, where I was going, and why so many unanswered questions dotted the horizon.

And above all, I remember the Fall leading into the Winter, the Winter of My Discontent, the Winter of the unwashed, unfed, uncaring me, the Winter that saw the splintering and disintegration of everything I had known, and the massive phoenix-explosion of what my life became.

And a small, secret, child-like part of me worries another winter like that could happen.

It's so ridiculous, my childish fear. My earnest dread and fright that it could happen again, it could all hurt again. Spending my winter in the dark, in a chair, with the world on fire in a blanket of snow. With my fingers and toes aching and curling up with cold, endless nose-running, and watching the frost suffocate the leaves and tender roses. The endless crying, the companion insomnia, the utter hopelessness and innate sense of embarrassment-I don't deserve to be here, I don't deserve to walk the streets, I don't deserve to breathe, I am the single biggest and greatest fucking failure you'll ever meet on a snowy curb.

I know that I am in a different world now, that I am in a different life. I know that kind of Fall is far from what can happen now as I am a different person. I know that there is someone swinging above me, holding on to my hands and making sure he won't let me go. And there is not only him holding onto me, there is a stronger part of me, a stronger sense of self that is strung below me as my safety net.

Yet it doesn't stop the tiny trepidation that lingers in my soul, falling into my toes with every falling leaf that I see out the window...the hope that I never, ever have another season like that ever again.

And so instead I turn into Angus, the man in charge of my heart, curling into his arms after a round of fantastic loving that I know to have with him. I curl into him and smell the sweet copper penny smell of sex, the smell of sweat, of holding onto your bicycle handlebars too tightly on his upper arms, and I lay my head on him and fall asleep, with no hint of Kafka dreams marring the surface of my sleep.

My world has been an ocean for so long, a ridiculous tempest that strove to drown me and leave me in a curling grave.

It's time I faced my Autumn, and stared the bitch down.

-H.