Autumn; A Letter To You

I am unfamiliar with true, complete love during the season of autumn - there hasn't been one. This may not be the reason why autumn feels like my season to completely self-destruct, but it's the first one that's actually been intriguing. We weren't us, or you were at school, or you had left me, depending on the year in question. The closest I've been to love with leaves falling happened at age 14 in Oregon with my first boyfriend who I dated because the boy I'd had a crush on since 5th grade said I should - our relationship never meant love, and according to the reason for our break-up perhaps it didn't mean feeling anything either. The next autumn, though I had a new boyfriend, I had moved away and was treading water in confusion between that boy and a PK and what being the new girl means all at once. That boyfriend and the PK felt always at a distance from me, as if I was simply writing my role in their lives as they felt like they needed me to be present - to listen, to reassure, to fill some kind of void - looking back, there were no real surprises or twists or turns. By the next fall the boyfriend and I we're falling apart, like old sneakers worn out with the miles between us and the pointlessness of love from far away with a whole world still left to see and then we were done. I barely remember that year of my life from Sophomore Fall to Junior Fall - maybe it didn't actually happen. I didn't really exist. The far away boyfriend and I broke up in spirit after Thanksgiving, but stuck it out on paper through the first days of January. But you and I began to exist when I said I liked Tame Impala and you made a point of letting me know that you did too. 

I didn't cry when the far away boy and I fell apart, I already knew I was about to fall in love with you. But that was Winter. The next fall, you had gone away to school and though you came to visit here and there, there were no pumpkin patches of halloween costumes or jumping in leaf piles - we simply didn't have the time and if we fast forward to one more fall later - I was alone. I was alone and you were alone and we were in the same town, even the same building but it was over. We moved up there together, and I was so painfully in love with you that I couldn't comprehend how to accept that there may be a person on the planet that loved me as much as I thought you did. But you left, and I accept a lot of the fault for that, I do. I was an anxious mess and it was unfair to unload every ounce of it onto your shoulders every day - you can't be forced to witness grief that isn't yours, the kind that needs to be looked at by a professional. I've learned this since you've left. But Autumn has become habitually unsettling as a tradition. I didn't go home for more than a single day that year. The autumn after you left I left for Florida; the one after that, Costa Rica and the year of 28 countries. I clubbed and drank and made architectural models out of scrap material and lived within a host family that could have been a top-rated telenovela, but real? I had decided that love was an irrational bit of matter floating through the ether that even the luckiest people only catch once - I'd had mine. And besides, in Costa Rica there isn't fall that time of year - just hot, tropical rain.

According to the actual climatic, sensation of Fall - I didn't have one from the time you left me until the term I spent in South Africa which happened in the time I'd always known to be Spring. April or May in the Western Cape feels like Autumn in Oregon - wet and chilly but never "too much" of either. I felt like a grown-version-of-young; I had a groove, or maybe I just danced with all that came to pass, why not? I loved myself. I came home and it was summer - I came home to you. Just as quick as you asked me to forgive you, you left, again. So the fall met me again in Florida, to finish what I'd started when I ran to the Lake so in love with you. I failed economics and had a complete breakdown, I went to counseling and tried so hard that I would take notes on myself between sessions so that I could tell this story as truthfully as possible and could barely write that humongous Thesis you'd helped me brainstorm (I don't know if you knew you'd helped but you did) and the panic attacks came back and I thought going on an eery road trip to Vermont and a near death experience in Appalachia, and that psychedelic trip when that friend called me from home on the verge of quitting life and all the stuff and things happened - but love didn't. I went home. I went to Colorado and saw my friend from Costa Rica and another part for the friends from South Africa, I went to Salt Lake for a flash I hardly recall and back home. I skied and started medication. I ran, painted, ran, ran, ran my way out of believing in the best of you; in my naïvely hopeful thesis that I wasn't allowed to speak my truth into - a truth that feels fairly hopeless, yet for that very reason it is hopeful. 

This fall I am seeing for the first time that I've failed at giving hope a chance. I've pretended to be Hope's passenger that would be gently plopped on whichever island is furthest from you, or careen past you holding hands with the new love of your life on that corner by that coffee shop in a Volkswagen with windows rolled down and There She Goes blaring out the window. I'm getting out of the car, learning what people mean when they say they've lost count of the number of broken hearts in your wake. I don't yet believe when people say I could do much better than you - but the fact that it's said gives me hope that one day I might. I should believe it by now, the problem is that you were much better than you get credit for. And life hasn't been easy on you before or since, I sure haven't helped the matter. My existence drove you insane for the three years I was circumnavigating the globe doing increasingly absurd things with every turn. I wouldn't have survived watching you do the same, I would worry and hate you at the same time - but I was just trying to figure it all out. I wasn't easy to date in the first place because I am some disastrous combination of Elizabeth Bennett and Alaska Young and imaginary women who will never exist but somehow all live in me and then some more. I fly only in the deepest, darkest constellations that the boys I've dated, and you - the one I loved - could have been immensely hurt by for its sheer immensity. It's my mistake though, I thought it was our job to live the wildest love story of all time with all the emotional baggage - was I trying to choreograph the plot in my middle-aged memoir titled: Us; A Life of Love With No Regret. Maybe. Honestly, maybe. I can't say for sure - partly because I haven't managed to care, deeply for anything - people, animals, vegetables, minerals - since you unless that care came in the form of despair. I know love could always potentially happen - but someone once told me that "potential" is a bit of a bore because there's plenty happening right now. That's true. But a more honest reason I can't correctly remember where I went wrong is that the last words I remember you saying to me are: "I've done a lot of thinking and I don't know, maybe I just never really loved you."  What? 

That's still the only response I can land on to that phrase in my head - though we both know what the last thing I said to you was. After everything my technicolor-melancholy soul ever said sat in your palms and traveled the world looking for ways to stop loving you but found none - you never loved me...? We still remember the last words I said to you, I'm sure. This autumn, I think maybe I can see what I've been missing. I'm not ordinary. I'm not vanilla or simple or easy or whatever degrading term the kids are using these days for young women like me who run from men at bars and dance only for themselves and howl at the moon and spend so much time alone.  I'm like this Finnish custard dessert that is frustrating but intoxicating to eat because it is rich and sour then incredibly sweet to such an extent that you have to eat it with a tiny spoon to keep from overwhelming your tastebuds. I recall all of its flavors and its coolness and richness and crave it deeply, knowing I can only have it at the Family Summer Solstice dinner on the lake - but when that day comes I can hardly eat the whole cup. I'm more pleasant to recall than to witness. I'll accept and admit my similarity to a Finnish custard, wholeheartedly. I'll also admit wholeheartedly that I have learned - despite how good it feels - that it is entirely unhealthy to vent all of one's deep dark emotional baggage onto a significant other. I've learned this is why people get a therapist. I've learned getting myself to show up to therapy is like ripping my own teeth out and I am only sometimes in a mood to inflict pain upon myself. I've learned what you may or may not have meant when you said "I've been lighting myself on fire to keep you warm" or what he may or may not have meant when he said "I didn't know your problems were part of the commitment." I've learned only recently that I really am something of a livewire, electrified with a high voltage of shit to figure out. It's not your fault - it just made and makes sense to everyone to blame it all on you. To everyone, there is only one side to me, the one that glows with wise-ness beyond my years and is given the Free Spirit Award as a Senior Superlative. But you know there's the other - with chronic pain, fatigue, despair, and demons - and it would seem you've kept that one a secret, I've never heard of anyone knowing what you know that I haven't told myself. It's a list of people that fits on one hand. Maybe you never loved me, but you've kept my own Pandora's Box sealed tight for whatever reason - and I'm sorry. That's something. Some part of you lives in the same neighborhood as my memories of whispering to you on the carpet with the tune of Ariel Pink's Haunted Grafitti scratching on vinyl - it's the part that doesn't hate me. 

I'm letting you go and it's a lot more complicated than us never raking leaves together or making a first fire of the cold air. I'm letting you go because when I look at myself through anyone's eyes but yours I see a girl that I would listen to if she would just say what she means to say exactly how she means to say it. I only say I've moved on; that I'm exercising regularly; socializing enough; making progress - but it's not hard to lie about improvement in a world with cosmetic concealer, overtime work opportunities, plane tickets, and an affinity for light-footed sprinting from one avoidance mechanism to another. It's a dance routine to be mastered and manipulated over the course of life - mine has taken the form of a demanding pas de deux since we first shared Tame Impala in our old, rickety, first vehicles. 

I need to tell the truth about how I feel about love and you and all I've done and run and seen and felt so that I can seek lightness and hope and beauty without calling bullshit on myself. I need the good to exist independently of your memory, or what I think you might like based on knowing how much light you gave me when you never loved me. Levity in my hopeless romantic, chicken-little world has thus far depended entirely on coffee shop romances, imaginary slow-dances beneath a sea of stars, or bumping into you in the aisle of a grocery store or street corner while looking for Honey-Nut Cheerios. All the narratives I treat as biblical texts are the cliché flammable materials full of sparks and glowing embers and fireworks and warm glowing eyes and I forget to pay attention to the non-combustible wonder all around me that tells the less melodramatic story of my life. I'm sorry that I see the majority of the human experience as painfully ugly and I just wish we could all run outside at the same time and scream that confession to the sky. I know you're gone, and I know it still feels more painful and more ugly with you that way because all I hear is silence. You're gone, and I'm letting that be so that I may sprint head on into the chaos and glow that rests beneath my surface. Sprinting that way is the polar opposite of wondering whether I'll pass you on the street, wondering what I might say if I did. Maybe you never loved me - so you didn't, but I loved you; so let this truth let you go, and then set me free.  I hope.