Autumn on the Right Coast. It's been a long time coming. Days of pushing through pockets in dense fog, or in light rain, or in European chill--whatever. It's not just missing the beginning of school, that Pavlovian concept of new backpacks and gear coming with the change in leaves. The idea that it was time to dig in after a summer of listlessness and really grind it out. The time where events started again, new roommates were vetted as cohabitants and partying partners. The time when every man and woman is reassessed in the annual report of "what we're about." And how.

But it's not really that feeling that dominates. There's a palpable shift in the air. It's not the temperature--although who complains about long sleeves and pants--it's the feel. The music that you listen to, the way that you walk, the way that people look and the things no one is hiding, just guarding for a while. It's not off limits. There is growth that will come through the cracks, hinting of the pale fire below. There is love in the fall. Look.

The bare limbs of summer go in the drawer along with swim trunks and sunscreen, and everyone acts like real adults, for once, if just for a few months. Winter will come and the individual falls gently into the fold, devolving e pluribus unum into a huddled mass of weary travelers praying for drier days and spring that will show the bracelets and faint hair on arms. Are you ready? Can you taste the air? Can you drink it down?

Births are more likely in fall than spring. We ignore nature, innately.


***


In college fall always was defined by visiting Bonnie in Boston, train rides on the Worcester/Framingham line, with a CD player and 24 CDs (no iPod until after graduation, gasp!), or the occasional visit to see Maureen at Wellesley, (to confuse my life just enough to keep it interesting--a drop of orange paint in a still gallon of white). The ride was an hour and rife with emotion and blasting whatever music was changing or defining my life at the time. I wrote magnificently bad poetry and songs on those train rides in notebooks that have been tucked away under amateur efforts at drawing and writing meaningful nonfiction (a pursuit which I jettisoned with the advent of my first white hair, Ireland, 2006). She would pick them out at first, and I would keep a few as reminder to not take myself so seriously, a pursuit that fit like a hand-me-down this trying to avoid my own family history; it effort was tattered enough that it has always been ignored.

We were all in love with things and places and people, and my heart would nearly explode with the excitement of seeing my friends or best friend, or longtime Only Important Person in my life and the soundtrack of my life, and of theirs, constantly blaring through crummy headphones, bleeding into the little things, eating, sleeping, reading, smiling, with sun or without, with beeps between songs. One year it was almost exclusively "The Ugly Organ."

How'd you get so smart?


"Sierra, my little girl we would have been so... oh nevermind."


I long for a breeze through trees in Boston Common, hating being away from shitty Worcester and wondering what life was about, but knowing how badly I needed to be there and how much I worshipped the one I was with. Come springtime this sentiment would be harder to express. During winter it was a necessity. Come summer it would be natural. But in the fall upkeep was vital and facil (if you will).

There is nothing easy about winter. Even sledding is a victory.


***


This is the time of year where people are ready to be productive and actual members of society as opposed to being jetsetters, escaping the reality of the rest of the year. Every week is the space between events, now every weekend becomes the divider between the authentic. I'm standing on the edge of the biggest, endless summer of my life, and I'm awfully sick of the concept and the me that it created. "...the test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing ideas without cracking up." Well I've been entertaining this perpetual youth and this desire to be Someone and get something Substantial done in my life and it's driven me to distraction from everything.

What is the point? What is the goal? Where is the finish line and how am I not finishing first?

I am constantly ruined and wrecked with the dichotomy between living my life in a way that I think is Right, in trying to achieve my goals, and trying to enjoy myself along the way and figuring out why I can't make things work. I'm hoping fall has something to offer me. Maybe this excitement has a dash of plaintive request, "help me, please. I'm trying. Honestly. I am. Please."


***


"I hate it here. I'm hurt, in a fucking sling forever, I have nothing, I struggle to get any work done, and I have no clue what's going on with us. All you do is go and do anything that you can unless it's with me. You'd sooner watch TV than actually spend an hour with me. I came from Boston, what exactly isn't enough??"

"I need to have more "me" time."

"Jesus, ALL YOU HAVE IS ME TIME. Your life is "me" time. And increasingly it feels like my life is "you" time while I try to get healthy and figure out my job and what I'm even doing here I'm trying to juggle your schedule and your finances. Grow up. Or not, or just... help me, please. I'm trying. Honestly. I am."

"I don't know what to say"

"You never have; I don't know why I'd expect you to now."


***





 
California is where people go when they don't want to grow up. There is nothing wrong with this--we all adapt to the world in different ways--but me, I'm prepared for starched collars and a little seriousness. I know how to break up the quotidian without living everyday running and I know how to love without making up the rules as I go along. I'm 26 years old.

Fall is the time of the adult. Summer is the time of the child. Spring is the time of the teen. Winter is the time of the identity crisis.

San Francisco particularly is this kind of Unreal City of fake jobs and a mountain of shit outside of work masquerading as a life or the pursuit of personal freedoms and happiness. How excited we all are to be young and alive and free, only vexed by the need to show up at 9am Monday morning. Who wants to pay for their mistakes? Who wants to suffer the shackles of love, be it for a person or a thing? Who wants to be wrong?

Am I right?

And then as we travel to Tahoe for "winter" and Santa Cruz for "summer" and stay at home for something resembling everything else, as we fool our bodies and minds into the concept that this is anything short of insanity, that this journey is one only deeper into neurosis, carving out the facets in the facetious, ("Mon sembable, mon frere!" yelled out to your own shadow, the only part of you that isn't hungover, on a rare sunny day in the Richmond) and screaming out, throat sore, "Oh My God, What Have I Done?" when there is no body. "Without the body there is no crime."


***


Once there was a circus outside of town but now the circus is gone. There was an insane asylum then just off of the main strip but they just let everyone out into the streets. The world is too much with us each here. Cages rust. But... are we free?


***


"I need you here, like now. I've never been so lonely in my life."

"I'm coming, don't worry, it's your birthday present right? :) Just make it through a few days. How's the hostel?"

"Okay, still weird to wake up so early and strange to see the shifting cast of characters. So this is what it means to be an expatriate? I've got plenty of stories, but they're missing a key character"

"This is what we wanted, let's see how it turns out. Any plans for the actual day in question?"

"I don't know, 22 seems sort of boring but I guess anywhere here it's a plus tick. There's a brewery nearby, I was thinking we could go down to Temple Bar (the area, not the bar, yikes) and watch the match. UGH, are you here yet? I've been waiting for what seems like forever."

"Me too."

"You'll love it here. I know we can do this."


***


This is about affording oneself the courtesy of grinding through guilt and regret in measured, even strokes and tempo in order to purge for a new year of hustle, a new year of fun and the people who one cares about. Leaves, chills, hugs with itchy fabric, cold feet in bed. This is about a hundred thousand cups of tea with raw sugar, or honey, or footsie, or nothing. This is about a million exchanges mollified by a wink, by the blinks that never considered give away a billion moods. This is the nature of the beast and the gyre and the clearing, sucked into a hole and thrown up on the page by an arthritic, bulimic typewriter. These are the steps taken in the opposite direction to knock on the window, pound on the window, wash the window, smash the stupid fucking window wondering what the past has to be so fucking smug about. This is the soul of autumn, and the descent into a place too dark and a red so deep as to be mistaken for blood and for the inevitable honesty of blood. And this is one big, consuming and ingratiating lie in an attempt to circumvent the one actual truth:

that regardless your address,
or your climate,
or your silence,
or your lying, cheating eyes,
that

"of course you end up becoming yourself."


And there's no way around it. But a change in seasons seems like a good plan.