All Fall Down

As I stepped through the doors of La Guardia and into the New York air last night, I detected the change instantly - it was fall.  When I left for California, it had still been the tail-end of summer.  But even through the exhaust of a thousand cabs and the smog of low-flying planes, the shift was unmistakable.  The air had changed, bringing with it my favorite season.  September has always felt like the harbinger of new beginnings to me far more than January, or even late March, the very beginning of spring here in New England.  If I made New Year’s resolutions, I would make them now, not in the middle of a seemingly endless winter that stretches ahead of January 1st for at least another three months.  Though autumn has always brought with it a fresh school year (well, until I graduated from college, that is), beginning in 2007, it has also been the time of heartbreak, sadness, and despair.  Why it’s still my favorite season is a question that deserves an answer: because, for as many times as fall has been the season of things that knocked me down, it has also been the season during which I inevitably get back up.

In the autumn of my sophomore year of college, my first serious relationship went up in flames.  It was a long, drawn-out, messy affair, the pain of which I refuse to trivialize, despite the temptation to dismiss it as the inevitability of first love and all that crap.  I was with a person with whom I believed I wanted to spend the rest of my life.  She felt the same way.  Until, one day, I realized with gut-wrenching finality that I didn’t love her anymore.  So, it ended, and it was awful, and it was sad, and then it got darker and more twisted as we got back together and fell apart again.  We stomped over each other’s hearts, both of us too scared of life without the other to realize we were killing what we were so desperate to save.  Winter turned to spring and spring to summer, and it seemed that things were better, that they were okay.

In the autumn of my junior year, I fell hard, headlong, and dangerously quickly into rapidly cycling mania and depression.  Frantically, I tried to dig my way up and out of the hole I was in, only to feel like the more frenetic my pace grew, the sicker and sicker I became.  Eventually, I collapsed, hollow-eyed and utterly hopeless into a bed behind the locked windows of the local hospital’s psychiatric ward.  Slowly, ever so slowly, I picked myself up and dusted myself off.  I had help, or it never would have happened.  Doctors who listened, nurses who gave me extra socks, mental health aides who woke me gently from my nightmares, fellow patients who knew without the need for words what an awful, overwhelming, and terrifying task it was to simply exist some days.  My friends and family stood by my side, until, finally, the day came when I walked through the doors of the hospital and cried as I breathed fresh air.  Three weeks later, my fragile world crashed in on itself once more when the doomed relationship from the previous fall ended again, this time for good.  Sickness like mine was too much for her to handle and she made her exit with haste.  Barely, I’m still not sure how, I hung on.  I went to therapy.  I cried.  I needed my mom.  I cried some more.  I went to class.  I clung to Tucker.  I cried.  I took my medication.  I watched mindless television, huddled under mountains of blankets.  Eventually, I cried the last of the tears that she could ever possibly deserve, and I got on with my life.  Winter turned to spring and spring to summer, and light shone through the clouds because then, I met Alix.

In the autumn of my senior year, an ugly drama arose in my idyllic Smith world that threatened to ruin my senior year.  It didn’t, thankfully, and I escaped as often as I could to the haven of Alix’s New York apartment.  I hated that something so petty and ugly could take from me the cautious hopes I’d had for a better fall than the previous two, but again, eventually, winter came, then spring, and finally, graduation.

Last fall, Alix and I were weathering a terrifying health scare (for her) that left us both shaken and all too aware of life's fragility.  The word "tumor" that rested so innocently on the printed page of a biopsy report was the same that crashed unceremoniously and unwelcomed into our young, young lives.  The tiny mass was removed with surgery and classified as benign after toxicology testing; a freak development that will almost definitely never return, thanks to the thorough removal performed by Alix's surgeon.  The first night she was home post-surgery, I was frozen, numbed by exhaustion and fear.  I sat at our kitchen table in the gleam of a weak bulb, listening to her breathe, and I finally broke down and cried.  It hit me all at once that I could have lost the person I love most in the world.  Granted, the mass was small and completely benign.  But the fear was real, alive, and pulsing that night and for many nights afterward until it gradually subsided.

And this year?  This year, this fall, I’m alone.  In some ways, it’s the hardest yet.  In other ways, it’s the year when I look back at all the pain of years past and I am damn grateful to be where I am now.  There are days when I can see that where I am now, right here, is exactly where I am supposed to be.  There’s a quote by George Santayana that I love:

  

The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

 There are days when I feel like I’m running barefoot over those thorns, trying to get to the light shining through.  But I won’t stop running, this I know.  Those glints of beauty, love, and laughter are worth every sad autumn it took to get me to today.

Look Me in the Eye

I sat in the still, humid air at the train station and let out a quiet sigh, lamenting the fact that I had just missed the last train and was going to have to wait forty minutes for the next one that would bring me back into the city.  I was thinking about Rupert, and stressing about how late I was going to get home in order to take him out.  I was thinking of how uncomfortable the chair I was sitting in was.  I was thinking about whether there was a mosquito on my left foot.  Oh my, was I doing some heavy thinking.

A trio of people came walking down the concrete platform.  I was mildly surprised, since the next train was still forty minutes away and I had been counting on spending at least thirty of those minutes alone.  I glanced up from my book and noted a mother wearing a head scarf, a gangly pre-teen boy who was clearly her son, and a tall woman (an aunt? a friend?) who seemed at once both regal and gentle.  They sat near me, on the only other available chairs, and it soon became clear that the boy was on the low-functioning end of the autism spectrum.  He was having a hard time of it.  He used almost no words, and when his mother gently told him that he could have no more bread because he was throwing it instead of eating it, his violent reaction was so intense and so unexpected that I flinched.  He swung his head up and around and caught his mother directly under her eye, leaving behind what I'm sure will be a nasty bruise.  She gave a small gasp but said nothing to her son, except, even more softly and quietly than before, "Look at me, please.  Gentle head, now.  Gentle head."

I reached over and touched her shoulder.  "Are you alright?" I asked quietly.  She nodded.  "I'm sorry," I rushed, "I didn't mean to interfere.  Would you like some water or anything?"
"No, but thank you."  She gave me a small smile and I saw in her eyes something that took my breath away.

I saw a love so deep, so unflinching, that it withstands unintentional abuse and outbursts from her son whose future is so uncertain.  I saw in her eyes that she understands what it means to love without any hope of reciprocation.  I saw that she knew pain that I couldn't begin to understand.  She was so calm.  She was at peace.  I was not.  I went back to my book and swallowed the lump that had formed in my throat.  Stop, now, I thought to myself.  Stop and appreciate this moment.  You may be dealing with a lot right now.  But her - right there - you've got NOTHING on her.  

I wished for the ability, for the grace, for the power that none of us have to take away her pain.  It didn't come.  I didn't open my book on the train ride home.  I gazed out the rain-streaked window at the slowly darkening sky and tried to swallow the lump that wouldn't go away.  I don't pretend to understand what it's like to have a differently-abled child, particularly one with severe autism.  But I sure as hell understand what that mother is doing: she is staring straight into the eyes of the challenge that faces her and she is not backing down.  As I watched in my window the reflection of her cradling her now sleeping son across the aisle from me, I thought to myself, Looking life's problems in the eye may not take them away.  But it sure beats the hell out of backing down without a fight.