I’m convinced there are few people who love Fall more than me, who adoringly kneel at the altar of colored leaves drifting towards the ground and horror movie advent calendars and pumpkin spiced everything™️ as well as I do. Fall feels magical, has since I was a child and every time the season comes around, so does that youthful glee and wonder.
There was something extra special about being so enthralled with the season kicking off the holidays, all the long nights it took to hurtle towards large family gatherings where you saw your favorite cousins and exchanged presents you worked all semester to earn felt like it was made for me. Someone so used to the slow burn and yearning poverty and social invisibility afforded me. September 22 to December 20 belonged to me and no one else simply because no one spoke the language of Fall like me.
And my annual attempt at possessing an entire season (selfish much), is always an attempt at chasing the feelings I experienced more than a decade ago. See to me, Autumn feels like the weekend leading up to the first day of school when you’ve memorized your schedule and picked out your first day back outfit and hide under the covers at 3 am cause your mom thinks you’re still awake (you are) but you’re in the middle of THE most important chapter of the book so sleep deprivation be damned. Fall was my fresh start, and that’s something I couldn’t articulate the importance of until very recently; When I found myself taking a shower and slipping into this space where I was not quite my adult self anymore yet too leathery to fully assume my adolescence. A space that I lamented being dragged out of shortly thereafter. This was a rookie mistake, and one I hadn’t realized I was doing.
I’d made the grievous offense of romanticizing the worst period of my life.
It’d be easy to rationalize my love for Fall if all I’d attributed to it was the entirety of my experience, but despite my wildest dreams, I’m too aware of how painful this period of my life actually was. When nothing made sense and I did all I could to escape engaging with the world via books and other forms of media. That there were real reasons for my teenage angst aside from my hormones (though we’re saving those traumatic ordeals for the inevitable memoir, obviously.)
In summary, time has a way of softening the appearance of monsters.
As days turn to years turn to decades, what once looked like a fiery dragon with vibrant scales and sharp teeth begins to lose shape to assume the appearance of something more benevolent, a creature you feel bad for forgetting. For years I theorized the craving to listen to playlist I meticulously curated in 2012, order frappuccinos I once loved but find too sweet now and reread dystopian trilogies as some harmless compulsion that comes with aging, the dying gasp of a 20-something who just can’t let go of the golden years. Except those weren’t my golden years, not by a long shot. Life got better as I aged, so why couldn’t I let this belief go?
At one point I reckoned it was because the world had gone to shit and I needed to remember it wasn’t always like this- newsflash, it was. Then I’d been convinced the inner child we’re constantly reminded exist was exercising her right to be a bitch safely but those ideas fell flaccid in the face of reality. There was a name for this feeling in my chest, an experience as old as time: grief.
The movies and the music and the too sweet Starbucks drinks were grief in motion. An iteration of life between denial and bargaining where I take all that’s left of my adolescent hopes and dreams and string them up like marionettes. I had no problem leaving the material circumstances of those early 2010’s years but fought like hell to take my child-like fantasies with me. The ones that told me this would be my school year for academic success (that was a given #giftedkid), romance and a full circle of friends. Fantasies that whispered the life I’d imagined was on the other end of one more dark night where I refused to sleep. That it only took one meet-cute during homeroom or rich stepdad to free me from my reality fueled my days.
I didn’t spend a decade refusing to truly mourn an age, but rather a concept. Imagination and faith in the world I could only possess because I hadn’t participated in it enough. No amount of Practical Magic and whimsigothic could make me regress to a teen who hadn’t lived enough, to know the day I was convinced would change my life never came. That instead of instantaneous relief from heartache and loneliness, it would have to come in parts, across decades of time with no forewarning. The arrogance of my teen self just knowing they’d have notice whenever their life was about to change drastically proved to be foolish.
She was hoodwinked but I was the one paying the price.
Beholden to work through her agony disguised as freedom, expected to smile and figure out more of her shit before my life really began. But having grievances about her dreams was as useless as attempting to make them happen every year the colors of the trees change. My expertise isn’t in grief but I’m an old sport at it (when I recognize that’s what’s going on at least). There’s no way I could begrudge a teenage me for receding further into the psyche and inner world she spent years enriching because the real one sucked so often. What could I have expected from a girl who only spoke the language of Fall? Months well versed in the art of longing and patience? Was it fair to shit on the dreams of youth when that’s all she had? My fully developed brain wants to say no.
I’ve always been someone who prides themselves on personal development. Not in the capitalist-productivity-demon way, but in the healing-is-a-radical-act-of-self-care kind of way. Once I know something, it feels blasphemous not to act on it yet I have little desire to fix this flaw, to relieve myself of the grief of dreams. To abandon my youthful demands of life would be to deny they were ever possible, or at least it feels that way.
If there were an analogy I could use to describe this feeling, it would be like the days when you have a strong urge to cry, and you know in the end you’d feel better for caving in but today just doesn’t feel like a crying day. You don’t want to deal with the snotty nose and ensuing tension headache and salty, watery throat no beverage soothes- you want to control the ugly parts of your existence for a little while longer.
Workshopping how to approach the horror of letting go is a painful, lengthy process. One that I realize as I look around, a lot of people need to invest in. We see it in the crevices of the people-who-don’t-leave-their-small-town jokes, the reason we all know at least 2 former athletes who never went pro but can’t help interjecting the stories of their long gone glory between discussions of current sports news. It’s the reason some TikTokers whole accounts are recreations of 2000's–2010’s scenarios fitted with the clothing, tech and music of the time.
We’re all victims of The Nostalgia Tax, the kind that reminds us consumption has no place competing with memories.
To love Fall, to know Autumn in a way no one else is capable of would be to say I am the authority on grief. That I’m the only person in the world willing to bargain with ghost for scraps of things they can’t possibly provide. This love affair with nostalgia is the longest relationship I’ve ever been in, but it comes with no candles or congratulations. Instead it leaves me weepy, carefully crafting environments and experiences similar to those of my youth while purposefully misnaming grief as sentimentality.