i woke up today after feeling like i’d never wake up again. i wasn’t sad—rather, i was empty, like the sky this morning. a soft expanse of nothingness, it’s edges foxed with a dusting of rot or clouds, it’s unclear which. but somehow i woke up again, the wind snapping and the sun a burning golden. the air is beginning to become very dry and very, very cold. it cracks the skin on my lips and flakes the back of my knuckles. i am watching the treetops bend violently outside my window, branches bent in a twisted death, a twisted rebirth. their leaves swirl then fall, memories of last season. november, finally, has brought a new beginning.
to be reborn, one must first find death, and i am like the bending oaks outside; death always comes to me in the autumn-time, and i kick and i scream and i beg and i plead and i sink into it’s arms like the embrace of an old friend.
i’ve felt it coming on for awhile now. my body has been suspended in a horrid stillness, my exterior frozen even as my vital organs crumble into shapeless dirt that weighs and tugs at my empty chest cavity. you’d never know from the outside, but my insides are rotted. don’t worry, it’s not contagious. i don’t allow it to be. it’s a rot that creeps in to let me know that exhaustion and overwork are taking their toll. it is a gentle rot, a human one, a natural evolution in the season of death. i am like an apple that has lived upon the branch for too long; i yearn to return to the earth from whence i came, i yearn for rebirth and renewal. let me sleep awhile amongst the little bugs and the wriggling worms.
i want to leave it all and go back to something simpler.
i woke up this morning, and i was still alive, and the dirt in my chest has started to empty itself goodbye, and my heart has stopped sprouting tender white roots and instead has tried its hand at beating again. when i tilted my forehead against the windowpane, the trees were nodding their approval. the skin of my knuckles was spiderweb-cracked, and outside the sun was shining in a november sort of color. the cold morning winds brushed my cheek, and i shivered. i felt something. i felt something.
death has come and gone, leaving nothing but a little soil under my nails and scuff marks on the threshold. i watch the leaves fall and fade. the time has come to live again.
author’s note:
a little fall yearning for you today! my own little ode to over the garden wall and rotting (but not in that way). i’m playing around with more pictures in my essays, because i like them and sometimes i forget that i am a free person and this is my page and i am not a slave to the machine.
god, how i love november. it’s rained twice and we are only on day four. it’s sweater-in-the-morning weather, and i am happy once more.
I'm in love with your writing! and omg do I feel you!
ain't that just the way 🤎