September
The weather is close, which is terrible. Walking through town, through the lingering solid air, is awful. There is no perfect outfit.
People say they love Autumn, that it’s their season, cosy season, but I don’t believe them. It hasn’t been Autumn for years. Not that sort of Autumn. Comfort food is too heavy this time of year. The leaves fall off the trees but the place tastes warm. Swamp season. The small of the back never lies.
I remember asking someone who spent their childhood in America what they missed about it. They said the seasons. In their part of the woods, you got snow in Winter, heat and the pool in Summer, dying crunch in Autumn. I don’t know if the seasons are as clear over there as they used to be. The woods are very much on fire. One night before bed a few weeks ago, I read a headline about how we’re facing into the collapse of a North Atlantic current. The consequences will be horrible. All changed utterly and all that. I still managed to fall asleep. Sometimes, the body beats out the mind.
I was eating in someone else’s back garden this Summer and a wasp kept joining us. The wasp was annoying and scaring one of the diners. It crawled on our food, it zipped near our mouths and cocktail glasses. I suppose the food part is disgusting, but I wasn’t too bothered as I’m a bit disgusting. Eventually the wasp was captured in an upturned pint glass. A pity. I was on the side of the wasp. Let him have our chicken, his world is ending, people are pouring concrete everywhere, the least we can do is eat his dirt.
But still, I want to believe. In that possible Autumn. I am knitting a blanket for myself in dark shades - russet, bark, moss. A big act of self-care. I get a pricey coffee some mornings before work. Tights and an a-line skirt? Paging F-O-X and Meg Ryan. I seek out the type of gentle novels that make me want to lie in bed, getting to know strangers and their entanglements and the cafés in their small towns. I treasure blank Saturdays and Sundays in my diary. I listen to dark academia playlists with terrible AI-esque or actual AI Autumn-y cover images - all trees and old buildings, all facing extinction because of this dumb tech - because they’re good for working alongside. Their banality mutes the fear, for a few minutes, that someday I’ll be telling people that I too miss the seasons.