evening stroll

I spent so much time in awe of beauty when I was younger, of the people who created it, wondering how they got so lucky as to have such abilities bestowed upon them. I wondered how it was that I could be left so desolate. Up until recent years, I had been preoccupied. Mainly with survival, as well as making poor relationship choices. But eventually I woke up to the tender dawn of my real self, a glowing glimpse of my real potential.

Here I am, just coming to realize I'm the same species as those I admired, and made of the same stuff with the same sort of abilities - to create. To take up the brick and mortar myself to build up the sort existence I only dared admire from afar.

There has always been something about the Fall.

You begin to feel that instinct. In spite of this heat, the summer's over; I can tell.*

I remember the day I first realized it. I was 12. My mom had asked me to sweep the front porch. I stood there on that porch of our corner lot, admiring the late evening sunlight. Only there was something different about this sunlight in particular. It was gentler, sweeter somehow - coaxing out the gems in the sidewalk below my feet, turning the whole world around me into gold. It was such a contrast to the sun of summer - so bright and harsh and overpowering all you can see is white.

I stopped my sweeping for a moment - raising my chin, taking a deep breath in, relishing the kindness of the breeze on my cheek. Fall, to me, has somehow always smelled as if there is a bonfire crackling away somewhere nearby.

We understand each other, us late-bloomers. We are kindred spirits. Myself and the greenery that bursts into color just as the rest dies away. I think I admire the lush blooms and shrubbery of the Fall because we relate so well. We don't have the timing others might expect from us. Due to circumstances somewhat unfair and very much out of our own control, it took us a little while longer than most would anticipate to get to where we are. But perhaps we are better for it, and hardier. Better able to withstand the adversity of bitter winds and harsh conditions that might cause others to wilt.

When Drew is gone, I feel like I'm living in a book written by someone else. I turn into the odd widow down the street who gets lost in the grocery store, who wonders for twenty minutes where the carrots went when she's been holding them all along, who wanders the neighborhood with a camera as the neighbors stare.

I'm happy to say he's back in this home, back in this bed. And my life feels like my own again. As he's shown me it is.

As I rushed home on my walk this evening, hoping to beat the sun as it quickly sunk below the mountain ranges surrounding, I thought about how I always feel this way - behind. But I immediately had another thought which seemed to aim to correct - that I could never be behind because there is nothing to catch up to. I am simply where I am.

You must become that which you are. You are what is happening now. You must become that which you are. You are what is happening now.

*Cheerful Weather for the Wedding