Seasons Of Essay

Soon afterwards, the trees will be completely bare, the shelter of their leaves cruelly abandoning me for months.I’ll feel the heaviness of humid air on my eyelids, shoulders and chest, and the burden will spread to my limbs once the seasonal flu claims its yearly consumption of my body.

Soon afterwards, the trees will be completely bare, the shelter of their leaves cruelly abandoning me for months.I’ll feel the heaviness of humid air on my eyelids, shoulders and chest, and the burden will spread to my limbs once the seasonal flu claims its yearly consumption of my body.

Crashes of thunder and strikes of lightning will follow me as I trudge through the thickness, slowly but surely, towards the hustling and bustling of winter.

The hibernal daytimes will be smoky and grey as ever.

The point of no return, the turning point (or so my study schedule hopes), when the order of events means that with one accumulated action things can never be the same again.

I understand this, understand it in a way where I am nostalgic for something I am in the midst of, understand it to the very core of my being. I know that July will be a blur of long car journeys sending texts that go nowhere (“No Service”, my phone will complain), grey days spent lying around will be filled with misty rain, the twin of the Atlantic saltwater that loves to rush up my nose and burn the back of my throat, a month leading through the old mossy overgrown path, the one that goes into the church at the end of the world.

The cracks in the footpath are amplified by the small orangish light emanating at intervals from lampposts that really should have been replaced years ago.

It’s something about the unnerving blackness of the bin’s shadow, a darkness that crawls up your chest and lets you know that, if you let it in, could spread and spread and spread and consume. The moon is following me, constant if ever changing, a contradiction like me and the month of my birth, the watchful guardian who is my bone-white foil to the depth of the darkness. The increasingly ever-evident trickle of the sand timer announces January.

The sizzling of rashers and sausages at the breakfast table each morning will try its best to distract me from the ominous silence of the pre-Christmas season, but the mornings will only get darker and quieter as I crawl towards the winter solstice. Jack Frost will conceal the blackest nights with a blanket of wispy snow, each new morning erasing the sooty footprints of the night before.

I’ll find comfort in the yellow glow of the million fairy lights lining the streets of Dublin city, hoping that those who have left us are celebrating and rejoicing in this brightness, too.

Life ends in October, a seemingly strange and somewhat wonderful contradiction to the beginning of my own.

Part autumn and part winter, in October I am strong.