save october

For all the useful (2%) and useless (98%) thinking that I do, feeling inevitably comes first.

October doesn't feel like October. It's too warm, and the trees haven't changed color. Maybe in the next few years, what used to be October will weave its way through to November or December, the way that wine country is predicted to move north from California through Oregon to Washington. So maybe it's not lost; it will just be in a different place, and that's the kind of thinking that normally comforts me. Except this time I can't bring myself to idealize the change. Because just when October has become my favorite month, it's slipping away from me. And October in November is not the same as October in October. Even if another month stole its temperature, its sunny cold days and light brush of a breeze, the effective crunch of dry leaves and the soggy stickiness of the wet ones slicked to shoe bottoms, the warm fiery colors, the medium-long days, even the sweet nostalgia for passing heat and anticipation of cold, and if you're in Boston, the first snow of the year...even if some imposter could do all that, it can't take its place in time. October is situated in transition. It lives after the waning summer, in the throes of schooltime beginnings, nestles itself before the big holidays and end of year. So please don't pass into something else, because you are the comings and goings. You can't come and go.

Awash in moods like this, I fixate on a question someone recently asked me about whether I'm easily attached. I do form strong affection for little, stupid things quickly, like the bump on my ring and the dots on my face (not moles, not freckles?) and people's laughs and the way they sleep. And okay, while I could accept letting go of those things if I had to, I do like sustaining the bigger things, in mind if nothing else. I can still feel the linoleum of Donnolly Hall against my bare legs on skirt days, can place myself into the intimate coziness of Adams B-37, will still smile at how he'd take care to return the strap of my tank top back to my shoulder after moving it to kiss me there, can every so often let the chill of the Sunset fog pass over and through me.

I value intimacy, the things that make me want to wrap my arms around them. Like everyone else, I want connection. Why, then, am I so drawn to distance in my relationships? With A and me, distance was defining. Physically apart, lives on entirely polar paths, opposite sensibilities. My parents always wondered why I didn't date anyone from school, my friends never imagined me with someone so different from me. Proximity wasn't appealing. In recent encounters there's been emotional distance, which somehow lends itself to an emotional interaction. Distance takes effort, it's rewarding, it challenges you and can sometimes make you more true. But sometimes, more than anything it's too hard and it's so elusive that I wonder how it can have such a grasp on me.

I don't make any sense but this is how it is. I don't want October to move to November, and I want to keep distance close.