I AM FALL #DIARYRIP
“Ode to Autumn in an old notebook I’m leafing through like Nas”
Billy Woods
“Stripped trees, the ground red and golden, sky clear, crisp, clean, sun out but the moon still there tracking over my shoulder”
Billy Woods
“I’m the same as I was when I was 6 years old”
Sun Kil Moon
The heat of summer gives you looseness in your skin. An ability to stretch yourself, move freely in the world. Travel light, travel fast. Summer is unburdening; the world which slept all winter is fully awoken; people, animals, plants climb out of their dens and perform. I’m two French presses in on the phone with a friend as the Scandinavian afternoon washes in through my 5th-floor window. Full of hope. Optimism. Career prospects suddenly look less dim in the light of July; I mean, what does it really take to get paid? Just a lucky look, and I’m competent enough to do it when it comes. Women that could be models I pass on the street become genuine sexual prospects momentarily. Well, yeah- we’d get a cocktail or two, and she’d probably bring me back to her place, I think, biking by. I check my appearance on the black screen of my phone, noting how the sunlight accentuates my facial features. Feeling feral. Feeling like I’m shiny. Goals for the year noted through the black screen and set. Everything is within my reach and achievable. On FaceTime audio, I’m telling him, “I’m banging all this Future and Drake; I DONT CAREEE,” as I try to convince him of my air of invincibility and carelessness over the phone. “Bulletproof.” I explain that I'm “Not Caring (trademarked), trying to convey through convoluted, faux-declarative language that I’m adopting an attitude of confidence. Three weeks of euphoria, complete self-centered indulgence. I kept replaying a Frank Ocean line in my head: “sleeping good and long.” I don’t know where the line is coming from, but I want it to resonate with me badly. Urgently.
On the first date, she pulled out a pair of wired headphones from her bag and said, “Should we lie here?” All that running and ripping over town melted, and she played Swedish opera by accident, and we laughed as we touched heads in the grass and watched the night clouds move quickly through our line of sight. That was the first night of Fall. As August collapsed, I felt my complete self-contained, self-mythologizing frame waver. Oh, somebody else is seeing me now. Awkward conversations and heightened self-perception. The reality that my career path is one of soft skills and fake titles starts to set in, and I started boasting to friends and colleagues that my cousin in Colorado got a spot for me if I ever want to build porches with him. Half projecting my fear of coming off non-agentic and half coping with my life choices. That long, good sleep got shorter and worse. Compulsive hair scrunching and cigarette rolling increased. My self-proclaimed summer of anti-neurosis was undoing itself in real time, and it was time to go home.
My dad picked me up from the airport in his electric pick-up truck. When I got in, I could see that his nose was red and swollen from drinking. Coming back reminds you who everyone is and has been all along. Minneapolis is muggy and heavy. Melancholic both through my projection and recent history. When you spend 26 consecutive summers in one spot, each block becomes an emotional-topographical landscape. Every corner turned is another trip down the highway of memories. Stacked and plopped on each other. Some fond ones obscured through excessive drinking and smoking. Some crystal clear as day that you wish you could take back. I didn’t even have time to explore this geology on my own terms. Being home for a week, these emotional-archaeological sites haunted me like specters as I moved from one loved one to the next. They stared me down out the car window like ghosts. I went camping with my dad in the Driftless and watched him kill a bottle of rosé as he asked me how it felt to be getting close to 30. The bluffs that carve out this part of Minnesota let us run through them, and we stay mostly silent as we both look out the window, appreciating the same things. We’re not that different. Fall comes early in nature. Trout jump at dusk as we wade into the cool stream. I see Fall’s fingerprints all over the campground. Fuzzy blankets cover families from the cold; light frost builds in the corners of the windows of the truck.
That summer induced stretch of the skin, stretch of the body, of who you are. That tightens up around family. People who have known and loved you your entire life don’t know about your grand internal narratives. They know lil Nick. Lil bro. My son. Snapped back into my body, my body like a rubber band. Lying in my childhood bedroom, slightly hungover, thinking, get me the fuck out of here. Looking into my nephew's eyes, I see my brother right back at me. My big brother who used to ride me around in his red Mazda that smelled like Swisher’s. These are memories that are only impactful in that way to me, but you know what I’m saying. Fall is a secret history. We all made deals with ourselves to hold these memories close. Coming home after passing a note to a girl in class, the crunch of a Granny Smith for your after-school snack. Watching a purple sky fade and seeing your breath for the first time that year.
Fall is nostalgia. Distilled. And with the coolness of the breeze, that sensual, virile, summer ego-mask cracks and sheds off you. Revealing a layer of sensitive pink skin underneath. “I go nuts every autumn,” I told her, standing in her kitchen as she fried tofu on our third date. “I get sensitive,” I told my mom on the phone. I remember vividly choosing the same color for each notebook for each subject every year at the start of school. I used to pick green for science, red for literature, purple for math, yellow for social studies. I could never keep them straight. I remember the brittleness of the dead leaves as I jumped in with my little hands and big eyes.
Fall is death. The great emergence of life retreats; people go back to work; kids go back to school. The reality of life becomes so much more tangible, and the wet warmth of summer gives way to something moldy and stark. Plant matter rots on the ground, replacing lushness with damp dirt in the air. Like the ruins of the wasp nest on the camping trip, Fall collects the busyness of summer and engulfs it
Looking outside my apartment window again, now seeing the trees straining with color, I called him back and said, “I think I'm now moving to Caring (trademarked).” What does that mean? The breeze is starting to make me tear up. And like when she’d pass that note back in math class with a circled “yes,” ….. For the first time in my life, I am having a recurring dream. I’m in the bed of a train car going somewhere. I never know where. But there are always fields of lavender and heath. “You've been this way since you were little,” my mom told me over the phone. I get frustrated walking around thinking about this. I’m a dog chasing the car up the street. Caring is accepting that there is a bill to be paid at the end of it all. Caring is repentance. You aren’t built like that.
She stopped and looked at me, kind of confused, kind of concerned. “Go crazy how?” Realizing I might be too loose with my words, I told her I just feel the edges of life during this season. She told me she is sensitive too. I am Fall, I thought as I biked home watching spires stab into the night.