Sarah MacDonald.
I’m always in the same place when it’s starts to cool down—but it’s not that cold because the autumn breeze is a relief, welcomed—and here it’s Kitchener, and the sky is grey, but not so grey my heart begins to hurt, but it’s hurting anyway because I’m heartsick, in love but not knowing what love really is, and I believe it’s Fauxhawk Tom—or maybe it’s A watching me through the cafeteria doors during auditions or maybe it’s B when we talk online until three in the morning and my computer tower fizzes and coughs from running too long and later on when I’m older and not at all wiser it’s Z with his compass tattoo and he’s so young and terrible and I fall hard but not enough to wake up from the dream—and I feel the crunch of vibrant yellow and gold-hued leaves under my foot, it’s my first pair of Converse All-Stars or my checkered Vans with a fresh scrawl of Death Cab for Cutie lyrics or The Cure because at that time I loved Robert Smith more than I could think, and of course I didn’t know what love really was and said it all the time, so I loved Brandon Flowers, Alex Turner, Julian Casablancas, Karen O, Tegan, and Sara, too, and Ben Gibbard, and singing this one Doris Day song with J, my one friend who was so wild nothing could contain her, and her journals looked like pieces of art, and so we sang Doris Day in-between classes, arm-in-arm, and I whispered to her about the boys I loved and she whispered hers back, and we gave them code names and laughed, and she helped me put false eyelashes on, which were upside down but I didn’t care, and we did this with grace on the bus at Grand River terminal, which doesn’t exist anymore, but it’s where I listened to a burned copy of If It Was You waiting for Tom, singing gently that I’m a City Girl, and there he appears with his camo shorts, skater shoes and that stupid black hat covering his fauxhawk and that one black hoodie he always wore, listening to Red Hot Chili Peppers on his Discman, and he hugs me and we spend the day downtown first in the shitty mall that still stands, taking photos on my new digital camera, and I’m wearing a jean skirt over cropped leggings and my hair is in my eyes and I feel buoyant for the first time in ages and we kiss and I take a photo of him walking over those golden, beautiful leaves, and then at a better mall I buy him his own Vans that J steals back for me not two months later, and we’re on the bus holding hands, and I go home thinking the world is beautiful and amazing and this is what it’s really for, but then I’m shattered not once but twice by him because he’s with the true Emo girl, and so I find solace in angry Karen O and the steady riff of an Interpol song and I say never again and with Tom it’s always again, even in university, he’s there, but now, no, he’s gone, and it’s still autumn, it’s still only October and no matter how much it aches or how hard it feels to want something so much that you believe you’ll never have it, it’s still the very best month, and I’m always here, with golden leaves under my foot and an undeniable naive belief in love and magic.
~
I want to wander. I want to feel into how homesick I am. I’m the most homesick in the fall in spite of myself. Do you know what Kitchener is really like? It’s a sea of cement plazas, suburban developments, one downtown street stretching into Waterloo, long roads with big potholes, and buses that stop running at 10:30 at night. Kitchener is an adjective as much as a noun. It’s...Kitchener.
This is all to say I hated it when I lived there except for the brief period when the city changes in autumn—then I love it, and protect it with everything in my body, never wanting it to grow out of its ochre hue—the divinity that somehow envelopes such a monotonous place. It’s strange to come from somewhere you never wanted to be in but still go back to because you’re tethered to it by family and memory, and the tiniest thought, a flicker, that it wasn’t all that bad. That home is home, after all, and I’m contained in it as much as it is in me. Maybe I’m tethered to it because memories refuse to leave me. A friend said to me a few weeks ago how unyielding it must be to have such archivist tendencies. We were looking at my astrological chart and there it was, written in the stars, what kind of chronicler I am. What I mean to say is tethering to anything means remembering everything. And in remembering everything, you’re bound to love something, at least somewhere, if briefly.
The view from my eighth Toronto apartment is cloudy with patches of bright sunlight. I long for waking up in my old bedroom, on a twin bed I despised, but I felt content and warm in any case. I love the way my mom’s backyard looks in the fall. My bedroom window faced east and I watched the sun creep through the slats in the blinds, twinkling on my wall. The big maple tree in our neighbour’s yard hangs over her cement patio, dancing in the morning breeze. Even when the natural world is beginning to close up shop and descend into a humble resting space, my mom’s yard is still the brightest green.
~
Have you ever had watered down beer in the gym of a middle school and listened to “Sweet Caroline” and felt it so deeply in your bones that nothing else matters except for this moment of bliss and yellow mustard and feathers in hats and cheap lederhosen and German ancestry and a plush Onkel Hans and there, you don’t know how you meet but you do, and he whispers that he’s been waiting his whole life for a girl like you in a jean jacket like that, and how fucking absurd that a man this tall and this beautiful and this painfully selfish could say a thing like that and how fucking terrible that you fall for it, you walk into his arms, his white shirt stained with condiments and cheap beer, and there begins the story you don’t want to know or tell but while you live it it’s somehow thrilling and it clouds you’re entire experience at school, training to be a journalist, and you’re off track, out of your mind, free in your first home away from home, and he’s the only thing tethering you to it, but it’s all just words anyway, he’s never actually there there, and you spend so many nights bending this body you hate that’s becoming smaller and smaller and therefore a prized possession in your eyes because being skinny was always the goal and a body is always how you get the man you desire, that’s what all the magazines taught you, and you fall further into yourself, wandering Roncesvalles, dreaming up excuses to go back to your twin bed in a town you couldn’t wait to leave because maybe he’s there, and so you get a tattoo when you’re sad and it’s raining and it’s your first one, a little puzzle piece because who knows why, and your mom says well it’s about time, and you’re relieved, and still he isn’t there, and when he does show up it’s a message on your phone, a bright green blob of played out dirty talk, but that’s where he is, at least, contained somewhere for you.
~
I come alive in autumn. I’m torn so often between my public affection for it and how to privately tend to the way the season nurtures my spirit. I’m like a child when it’s autumn, like I can assert something for the first time in my life without fear of judgement and mean it. This is mine and mine alone. It’s not about a pumpkin flavoured drink or flannel or posing among the fallen leaves or a meme you recycle year after year. Autumn is the place you dare not go in your brain because it means you must face whatever is there. I love to live in that space. The bright, cold moon, crisp weather, stinging, chilly rain. It’s magic, if only for a specific stretch of time for me, if only for October and then my birthday and then the rest falls into a silent tomb, like the Four of Swords tarot card. The end of November is that card to me. It’s not rest, it’s a break from looking at it all.
It’s Sylvia Plath saying she’s so pathetically intense and can be no other way. I can be no other way.
Sarah MacDonald.
~
My feet take me to the intersection at Lansdowne and College. Sometimes I’d walk to Dundas but the route I made that summer and felt more comfortable in by autumn always led me down College. I watched the trees that lined the outside of the primary school and rusty basketball court change colours and fall to the ground in front of me. I listened to the same Blood Orange track on repeat as I stopped at the light at Dufferin, adjusting my yoga pants, the Star Wars sweatshirt or oversized Strand sweatshirt I loved to wear on these outings. My feet took me to Gladstone and I often listened to Drake instead, which is silly now because I have such complicated feelings about him, but at that moment I loved how he was part of my new home, and I loved seeing the CN Tower through the break in the skyline by the Cadbury Factory. Hearing Aubrey’s voice on “Too Much” and Sampha, too, I felt at home, I suppose, finally, years after trying to settle in a place that often left me so unsettled.
On Dundas I walked past what would soon become my regular spots, but then I didn’t dare go out as much—I just walked everywhere to feel some kind of release. I was held in his grip, that music man, and I waited and wanted until I could not wait or want anymore and found myself at Get Well every Sunday drinking IPAs I hated but didn’t remember because that’s how many I drank. Anyway, when I get to Ossington, I keep going so I can reach the park. It’s beautiful this time of year. Have you seen all of the trees in Trinity Bellwoods release their leaves at the same time? I swear it’s an enchanting threshold to another world. Even the park on Roxton, if you wait for the right time, it’s a conjuring space. This deep, dark purple that fades into night. If you just step into it, you’ve arrived somewhere supernatural.
I walk to College and turn back to go west. Then I see him. We stop outside of the ramen shop and smile at each other and hug in a way that we both mean, really, for the first time. My limbs try to give way from nerves but somehow I keep them still, I’m smiling, and trying to be my best self, or at least someone else, in that moment. The light was resplendent behind him and I think that moment made me feel like it all wasn’t a game. That perhaps I had been thinking about it and him all wrong. Autumn can do that to you sometimes. It’s a beautiful whirling mess because of the magic and potency of your own belief in something as charming as love. It was never love and I know that now. I knew that then.
When I walk home up Ossington, along Bloor, and back to the safety of my basement apartment on Lansdowne, I feel slick sweat on the notches of my spine. I go to the only window I care to use, my front door, and stare outside. It’s dark out, but I can see the trees swaying softly in the breeze.
Ocean Vuong.
~
Autumn is both a beginning and an end. A portal to walk to discover something just for you. The leaves are falling all around you. Flowers start to shrivel. Grass is browning into a torched yellow. The natural world is disassembling itself in favour of rest and restoration. Autumn is the last push for wildness, I figure, before closing up shop for an icy future. It’s an entry in and an exit out of yourself—however you want that to go. This is the time of magic and aches and love and loss and feeling so small that I’m able to tuck myself into the harvest full moon and the shape of greying, ominous clouds and there I feel whole, and alive.
~~