Autumn Analogies...my very own form of psychotherapy.

City life and crisp autumn weekends, good.    

Good for various reasons--when I awake with the urge to seek out a flakey, homemade european  pastry, with the urge to nurse a cup of hot coffee, whose steam I know will wisp up into my nose, spreading a light film of humidity on my chin, I know I will able to satisfy these desires.  And it's nice.  

Plans for a little jog later help rationalize the butter.  I will jog from my house, more air into my nose, this time chilled like compost, down to Lake Washington, listening to podcasts from the New Yorker Magazine, hailing from another great city I have never been to.  Instead I content myself with west-coast, northern living.  Seattle.

Every day there's more of a nip in the air, fall is coming and with it, always a sort of melancholy nostalgia for me.  It's the smell of the air--the hints of rotten plants, of dirt, of memory.  I don't know exactly, but somehow during this time of year, memories seem to hang between dark ground and pale sky, just at eye level, bouncing into my brain as I run.  I start remembering other seasons of autumn, those long since past.  Today I thought of fall, my freshman year of college--I distinctly recalled the awkward, "tiny-fish" feeling I had then, so unsure of myself, yet marching my way to classes with everyone else, studying as persistently as it took for those grades, hanging out with my first boyfriend and all the giddy-nerdiness exemplary of such processes.  

So long ago!  

And when I think of that little girl from the past, inevitably I must trace her steps to the present, to who she has become.  Past the many bouts of laughter, the tears, the people who've come and gone, the places left behind, to now--to Seattle, WA, to 25 years old, to Ms. Clark.  

Wow.

It always evokes a sort of sadness for days gone by.  I don't wish them back necessarily, but somehow in their passing, I see the decline of myself as a carefree little girl, I see her transforming through the experiences, bending and sometimes threatening to break.  But we humans aren't made of glass, flexibility defies disintegration.  

Like light into a prism, I see my past self refracted, split, and glowing.  And now, as the evening sun slowly dissolves in spiced autumn air, I understand that its light is not lost, just readjusted, bending round the earth until tomorrow morning.