Halloween

Autumn is a peculiar season. It’s sometimes warm, sometimes awfully cold. The temperature flirts with both summer and winter, wraps itself in a dark, moody scarf and chic boots. It’s always the beginning of something new, and the settling of habits. We start to ease into the comfort of warm drinks and kind arms, while the sky deepens into grey. The mountaintops are dusted in a fresh snow, below it the gorgeous forests dappled in dark reds, burnt yellows and browns.

I always find at this time of year I have both a happiness crisp as the morning blue, and a sadness as solemn as the earth. There’s an otherworldly pull around this season, alive with possibility and dread. I have even started to believe that it is the spirits of those we once knew that gently wrap around our bones, awakening us to the trembling wave of life’s death.

This time last year, I was overcome with fear, and a grief that would drive me mad in the middle of the night. My body ached with loss, so utterly empty that everything that cluttered the world felt like a threat. Like a Murakami character, I was counting the skeletons in the room.

Anything could be lost. I craved to understand this other world, the spiritual, the occult, the murky depths of pain to find that person whom I had lost. I consulted their catholic God, and below a crucified Jesus my weeping echoed on the stone walls.

Sin. Halloween is the veneration of sin, a hedonistic celebration that leers at priests in their white robes. To hear religion constantly condemn a vague idea, an unspecified checklist felt strangely obsessive. I suppose I, myself, became strangely obsessed with these questions too.

To live, is a sin? Then to die, is what? The more I wandered in the dark nights of autumn, the further I sunk into a hollow despair. “It’s like I’m not really here” I sought to drape my sorrow with a heavy velvet spun from my bleeding heart.

It may be the season, it may be the dramatic whims of youth, or it may be the frantic reckoning one has as their birthday nears. We become intensely aware of our life passing by, and the clouds outside remind us the chill of a reaper.

This year again, I feel its bitterness creep back into my life. I imagine pieces of bone in the porcelain and my ears feel stuffed with the whisper of ghosts. But now, I can hold my teacup to my lips without trembling. I am still in the wind, and spread my palms open to the moon. This season I hold my fear like a wild rabbit in my chest - its wild racing heartbeat frozen against mine. This year, I may move slower with time, grounded like a snake among fallen leaves. I am calm, knowing I am in a safe place thanks to the loving people that hold me together.

A lot happens in a year, and somehow we stay the same. I am incapable of projecting myself into the future, as the world has always whirled me around from place to place. Everything feels possible. It must be possible, for we must live fully, carrying the void of death within us. As that space becomes alive in the autumn breeze, we shall be still, letting our close spirits pass through us.

Remember, seasons don't fear the Reaper. Happy Halloween.

-- a Scorpio