October: Anticipation, Infatuation, and Letting Go.

Photo by Jonathan Pendleton on Unsplash

There's something about dead leaves and a chill in the air that brings out the inner "white girl" in all of us. The beginning of fall, this month of horror and the slow death of flowers and foilage, makes us humans feel alive. It's a shame that St. Valentine is tied to February, because I tend to fall when the leaves do. I don't know if it's the flutter in my heart or of leaves through the air, but every Fall my walls drop with the temperature in anticipation of my life in this season.

Anticipation. I've noticed a pattern in relationships, and I've noticed that anticipation is the magic before the beginning. The magic we ascribe to that person we've had in our head. The magic, the anticipation, becomes them.

We anticipate. We strive. We conquer.

And sometimes anticipation is the only magic there is to the real thing.

But through this anticipation, we build infatuation. This person has been the protagonist to our dreams at night, and our thoughts are stuck to them like velcro to a fleece blanket. Through this infatuation, we never notice that we've lost the magic we found with anticipation. We bury our lives in other people.

And then we learn the lesson of letting go.

Letting go of rusted magic that we embrace as our lives is the most challenging part of any relationship. The letting go lasts long after the end. Until a few weeks ago, I didn't know how.

I saw myself walking...

walking all the way to Nashville, TN, but never moving forward.

I needed to let go.

That's where this blog comes in.

I've had a collection of people,

of possibilities, in my mind for years now. They were relationships without a beginning that never did end. And if the anticipation of Fall disappointed me, the anticipation of them never did. It took two soft blows for me to understand that the world I see on the other side of my eyes is not the same as the one that lives in my head. These people were characters in their own stories. I was the run on sentence.

I didn't plan it, but one by one I wrote about John Tucker, Old McDonald, Jess Mariano, and Dorothy's Scarecrow. Each story I shared was a secret falling from my unclenched fists. There's gratification  and power in realizing I chose to write my own chapter, and I took control.

Suddenly, the summer rolled into October. Anticipation and spell-spotted leaves brushed my goosebumps and the night air as I wondered what story to write in this chapter. The clock struck 12, I cried for lost magic and begged for some more. But at the end of my driveway, I crunched the dead leaves under my heel,

pivoted,

and let it go.