Ever since I was a child I would play a game with summer. I would attempt, through sheer force of will, to keep the trees green indefinitely. Each day the leaves were green was one more day before Autumn would come and I could hold back the dark a little bit longer. Each leaf a talisman against the slow decline of mind and soul, fragile tokens of reprieve, transient and finite. There is power in the green and growing things, even a child knew that. But even as a child, I had long ago figured out that everything dies, and if I wasn’t careful, I would too… sooner rather than later. The only question was, was that such a bad idea?
I started out a bright child, both in mind and spirit. I wasn’t always so dark, though it wasn’t long before that wasn’t the case anymore. A new home, a new school, and suddenly everything changed. Suddenly my enthusiasm was unwelcome, and my love of learning marked me as different. A naturally gregarious child, I was left with nowhere, no one to turn to, and all that intense energy focused inward. My light grew dim, shuttered, defensively protected. Summer was heaven, freedom from the expectations and malicious glee of my peers, I could just be.
Barely a year or two passed before something inside started to twist. As autumn approached internally and externally my world would inevitably narrow down to the singular focus of survival. Each day that passed I would pray to the trees, to summer, and beg that autumn would never come. I would pray that I wouldn’t have to choose between making it through the day and breaking down in front of the hobgoblins I’m told were my classmates. I would pray that the slippery slope into the dark wasn’t quite so easy, or quite so welcome. The enemy wasn’t just the gauntlet like halls of education, now the enemy was me.
There’s a moment when you realize that you’re broken, and you have to make order of the pieces that are left. A moment when you realize that you’re not quite right anymore, lost perhaps, and you have no idea how to find your way out of that forest alone. What then when the forest becomes your home? What then when you look around and find yourself comfortable in some weird way, all alone and neither loving, nor hating it.
It’s a strange thing to love something, and yet dread it all the same. Regardless of everything, I’ve always loved the fall, that slow burn of a season, where passion and dreams go to die. It reminds me of a dying woman who has decided that she will live life to the fullest, that she will have that one last fling in Paris. She bares herself naked, unashamed of her skeletal beauty and fading glory. I love that woman, even as she breathes her decay over me, a legacy I’d carry over to winter for her, every year without fail. I grew up the heir to her legacy, knowing that with her last dance I’d be dancing around my own, wondering if this time the darkness would ever lift. The never ending cycle of it became familiar and true, a constant all my young adult life.
Like Persephone, I spent ten years splitting my time between the warmth of the sun and the numbing dark. Unlike she, I wasn’t duped, and I’ve always felt that I had a choice. Do I eat of these seeds, knowing each one condemns me to shadow, or do I put that fruit from me and fight back as best I can? And so, I fought. Every year I’ve fought to limit my time served, for haven’t I served enough? Madness may be a permanent state of being, but I will not go easily into that living death. I’ll spend my time amongst the living, thank you very much.
I’m fully aware that I can’t turn my back on the dark, anymore than I could stop breathing. It’s a part of me, a part of life and death, and the universe, and it would be awfully presumptuous of me to pretend otherwise. The trick, the hard part, is to find a line and walk it, arms outspread and graceful. That’s the truly hard part, and the part that takes the longest to learn. Once you’ve got it though… it all gets easier from there. Or shall I say, less hard. I started to walk that line a few years ago and I’m getting good at it.
There’s a comfort in knowing the natural order of things. I know when I spot that first amber leaf that my time is coming. I know that I’ll have to be vigilant, that I’ll wake to sorrow for reasons I can’t explain, and that’s all right. It’s all right because I’m not afraid of the fall anymore, and it’s not my enemy any longer. I know how to work around it, how to draw a line in the sand during that time, and the whole year long. I know how to shift my mind just a little to the left, how to hold a light up in the dark. I know that I will fall, but I know that it’s not forever, and it’s not nearly so far as it used to be. I also know that I am not alone, and that should I fall, (and I know I will), that I have your arms to fall into.
