Anticipating Fall and Its Marriage to My Melancholy
If you’ve taken a glance at any of my other newsletter musings, it may come as no surprise that I am mentally leaps and bounds ahead of our highly anticipated Hot Girl Summer. My appreciation for summer is not to be overlooked; that excitement just surrounded me during my usual overeager timeline back in April. The promised season of sexual freedom after months of the world being suppressed, the tardy sunsets, that wonderful smell of sunblock, sweat, and cologne on the neck of the person of your current and hopefully favorite choice, the conversations that often feel like fever dreams because of their extensions into the depths of the night — I love it all.
Unsurprisingly I mostly have positive thoughts and memories associated with summer, which is probably why I am consistently glazing over it (it might be a good idea to unpack why I don’t focus more on said moments that render me galvanized, but we can save that for another week and/or when I feel as though I have an answer. Whichever comes first, really). I’m grateful for the season’s reliability. But now that we are officially in the deep end of it all (I’m currently writing this on the 4th of July, a true testament to my devotion to this newsletter and also a cry for help), my attention has shifted.
I’d like to go on record to say that most humans have an unnaturally strong attachment to specific periods of time of the year. Whether that be certain months, weeks, seasons, the days will roll around and sneak out from hibernation to give us a startling jab to the heart. It doesn’t help that the way we have declared the calendar year means that we have a very concrete way to track when exactly our sore heart will be bestirred. We can anticipate it as far in advance as our individual propensities allow for, prolonging whatever form of pain parallel paths these stretches of time.
My own sore heart makes its yearly debut at the tail end of August. It comes forth as a sprinkling of loneliness, followed by a wave of restlessness tied to the month of September. When October begins to rear its head, I have reached my final form. Full-blown, ever-elusive, cheesily predictable melancholy washes over me, knocking my equilibrium off the foundation so carefully and diligently built over the summer months.
It’s important to note that what I feel distinguishes melancholy from regular old sadness is that its source is unknown. I have no idea why I feel this way and why it lands within the time frame of the fall. I will, however, attempt to define the “this,” an indication of my lazy writing, as well as my own loss of words, for the sake of this piece as always.
My melancholy feels like a dull, pulsating, pain in the center of my chest. It comes to me during long walks in Central Park and is inhaled in the form of October’s crisp air and faint, coarse smoke of an origin unknown that travels all the way up to my brain, making itself at home as a pounding migraine. It is sometimes, but not always, paired with slow and silent tears that leak down my face, almost immediately dried by the wind, leaving behind a salty residue that stiffens my cheeks. It is the shock of the cold metal of a bench that I can feel even through my thickest of raw cotton jeans. It turns my limbs to jelly and gives a rough tap to the shoulder of my generalized anxiety. The fall always makes me think of my childhood, which subsequently projects me into a long, circular analysis of why that is the case. My melancholy looks like long stares at my face in the mirror, a focus on my nose, pink from the chill. Fall has a certain scent, and I’d like to think that I like it. It smells familiar, and there is some comfort in that. And yet, it instills in me an ache that doesn’t seem to resolve itself until December. The best way I could describe my melancholy is as that moment right before you fall asleep, the closest I think we can get to being between the conscious and unconscious.
On good days, I accept the feeling. I almost relish it. I reinforce it with a moaning and groaning Spotify playlist. I allow myself to stare straight into the mirror, and say to myself something along the lines of “ok, this is me. Alright. Ok.” Sometimes I convince myself that the harsh air is refreshing, or even freeing. On not-so-good days, I ruminate within the melancholy. I stand in the face of the wind and as it whips around me (sounds grossly dramatic, but I’m just being literal), I feel my senses go numb within this chamber; an all-natural white noise machine obscuring the more immediate, trivial, thoughts, and augmenting everything else.
I want to quickly note that this isn’t about the cold if that’s what you’re wondering. I’ve completely eliminated the dropping temperatures as any causal factor here (at least directly). I would also not liken it to seasonal depression at all. My spirits ring high in the winter, and it’s in competition with spring for my favorite season.
I do, however, want to revisit previous falls to dissect my shuffling brain a bit. More immediate fall seasons have felt like they were tied to a romantic figure. I think about them and think about how different things were at the time. It doesn’t make me sad, it just slightly shocks me. I think back to falls of decades past and refresh memories of me running around in piles of leaves tossed down on our lawn in Long Island by some of our more capable trees. I comb through youth soccer games and remember how much it hurt to scrape my knee across Randall’s Island’s turf fields when it was cold out. It was as if the air primed your skin with a certain rawness, leaving it vulnerable to any external abrasion. I think about being a college freshman and sophomore when it felt like fall was the happiest you could ever be before the academic year twisted your brain inside out. But I also think about my junior and senior years, when the autumns coincided with the worst bouts of anxiety I had ever, and have since ever, experienced. Fall encapsulates some very core memories for me. Events that fell within this time period are often revisited by me year-round.
I’m approaching a theory. These core memories just happen to occur within the fall. They are pure happenstance, an unfortunate cluster that I actually do not think needs to be analyzed Gladwell-style. When the months approach, I unsurprisingly and unoriginally begin to reminisce. I am triggered by the sensory familiarity of it all; the smokey air, the chafed skin. I resurface these pilar memories, these pilar memories that are either net positive or net negative. The core of the theory, however, originates from this divergence. These two basic categorizations cause my dull chest pain. I want to remedy the two, resolve them and figure out how I can begin to love the fall fully, and always. I want it to live up to the expectations I have somehow placed on it over time, but there are these outstanding events that blight my vision of it all. The battle between my worst and best memories reaches an apex, ultimately declaring the former its winner. This apex, this battle, and its victor are my melancholy.