When I sit at the round kitchen table inside my apartment and listen to the chiming of the train and the bustle of people walking by, I can’t help but notice the intense, changing colors perfectly captured inside of my window frame. The leaves are already changing and the tops of each tree melt into a vivid array of yellow and orange.
At this moment, all I can feel is uneasiness and nostalgia. I always feel this way as summer disappears behind me, vanishing not necessarily with the weather but as a concept only present so long as you acknowledge it.
Unfortunately, the moment your mind becomes filled with test dates, class times and important deadlines, summer vanishes. You can wish for it all you want, but it isn’t coming back, leaving room for nothing but reflection.
This summer, I had the golden opportunity to spend time with my closest friends and family. The days were filled with sun, sea, warm nights and excessive talking, laughing and singing.
With our collective youth still hanging on for one last summer, we were able to indulge and come to terms with the brazen feelings that come with the sentiments of a tight-knit group — our party against the world.
I think I developed quite a fear of missing out — not necessarily on events that are actually happening, but more so on the events that never will. I know that each moment can never exist again, not in the way it once did, and not in the logistical way, either. Kids grow up, work begins to accumulate and paths that were once parallel twist into one last sublime moment and begin to drift away from each other.
The summery photos I took of everyone — smiling and joyous — will recede further and further into a crystallized memory. The events that took place between such photos will become more blurry and out of order, as we are now all spread apart across the country, no longer sharing a collective climate.
In the morning, I will listen to a song that we used to sing together. A collection of notes and words culminated in a special arrangement of feeling and humor. A song that lifts my spirit and instantly fills me with the bittersweet nostalgia of company now lost, a dance now finished and a summer that is epically over.
I walk to class in the morning with the entire day planned out in my mind: school, work, coffee, studying. It becomes such a drastic shift that I can’t quite grasp how the lazier summer days felt. I can’t picture what it felt like to wake up without a plan besides simply enjoying the meandering, flexible path of the day.
As I try to recreate the meals we shared, the memorized scents fill my apartment in a comforting, yet dreadful way.
I put the photos of us on my wall, and when others ask about them, I recount the times in the detached manner that one employs when trying to mitigate emotion or thoughtful conversation. The perfume I wore with them — a sickly sweet citrus scent — was not packed with me when I made the trip from New York to Boston. Even in that regard, I can’t masquerade as the older version of me or reacquaint myself with that wistful scent.
Autumn is a transitional time, as the poets and writers have so clearly conveyed with their popular “turning a new leaf” motif. It can be an uncomfortable time, as we watch the world around us shift, decay and change.
The light between the leaves falls rapidly and smashes onto the pavement. The air that once warmed you is slowly sucking its heat back from your skin. The sun begins to hide a little earlier in the day, and the general tones of the world trick you by exploding in one last spectacular show before quickly fading altogether. The desaturation happens so instantly that there is only “before” and “after.”
Yes, the summer is ending — maybe to some it already has — and a new fall is once again upon us. Though the fall can feel like a personification of its name, “a fall,” maybe it can be a fall into something lovely, perhaps into a new passion or a new friendship.
Or maybe the leaves will fall right past you as you find someone new to watch them drift with.
