In the months of fall, I walk in the habitat of change, its personal time of the year, where earth itself seems to be peeling off its residue and starting anew.
The trees are stripped bare and months of shriveled leaves are crushed under soles. The world through the window is stained in bright red, orange, and yellow. Saturated shades of renewal. A beautiful portrait of sacrifice for the sake of new blooms that’ll sprout over the empty arms of brown.
Change is my biggest adversary. I sit at the stoop of its stairs and watch it looming above me. I await its descension. Sometimes it’s slow and sympathetic. Other times it’s imminent and dangerous, stealthily creeping up on me.
And all the time, I cannot accept it.
I fail to absorb its presence even as I lay dim and tiny at the crux of its approaching shadow.
When will I let go of the naivety of adolescence that so intensely fuels my dislike of it?
I will have to wake up one day and shake hands with change, sit across it at its table and smile as it rolls the dice. Whatever the face on the white cube, I’ll find a way to go forth from there. I tell myself one day I’ll be this submissive about its moves. But today is not the day and I doubt it’ll come this year too.
This enemy of mine requires one’s life to have a limited capacity. Like a brown weathered sack, it is emptied and refilled. Moments roll out and new ones in irregular shapes find their way in.
But my problem is I’m too attached to the warmth of my old ones. Too unrelenting to give it up. Even when they are long gone I’m hoarding their form, crystallizing their absence and refusing to let it hollow out and embrace anything new.
I ignore the fraying threads and thinning fabric as it tries to accommodate the old and the new, threatening to tear at this stubbornness of mine. I’ll stitch it back up, patch it, and embroider it. Just please let me keep all of my treasures.
My cruelest passion lies in my attempts to cast the transitory into stone, an undeniable piece of proof of having known it, of having lived it.
In vain, I try to stop moments from abandoning me. I preserve them in memoranda that lines my walls, draws me back into nostalgia. I hold them captive in jars and often bring them out to admire like dormant butterflies.
They are effervescent, escaping through the lid apologetically. I miss them while they’re near, and I miss them as they are fleeting.
The cycle of life stands in a corner mocking my silliness. This antagonist is one I’m forever fated to only worry about. I can’t fight it.
But its most insufferable quality is really its duplicity. It’s so deceiving sometimes it tastes nothing but sweet, I wake up some days and under its effect I can’t detect the faintest trace of bitterness. I dance its pirouette and smile at its adventures. I admit I’m grateful to it and I go as far as to pin my happiness on it. It bounces to the role of my biggest friend.
It coats me in the thrill of novelty. It brings me a newness I cherish because it introduces unfamiliar love and excitement. Destinations and hobbies that take my hands, easily convincing. It shows me a softness I was waiting for. Change pushes me off the sidelines and onto the road.
It can be giving and kind. An entanglement of relations and laughs and awes. A savior freeing me off the clutches of eternal consistency.
On good days, I try to excuse it. It’s not as selfish and sad as I accuse it to be. It allows me to retain a lot of my riches, it has no interest in stealing my memories. Often it offers me a way back and a chance to mold my love and adapt it to the present.
You’ll never have this again, it tells me. But you’ll have it in this way, or maybe this way. Different forms of what once was. The best it could offer. I mourn the diminishing version behind the glass, the one I’ll have to say goodbye to. When I’m done complaining I’ll take it up on its offer, of course I will.
You’ll be compensated, it tells me. It extends to me trips across borders, people in different hair colors and mother tounges, goodbyes and hellos. It shapes me into an new me, a girl that carries independence and adulthood, guilt and gratitude.
Often I look in the mirror and it’s a brief moment of unclarity. My reflection is growing unrecognizable and yet in her I can still see the slivers of childhood, the outline of teenage awkwardness, and this frail exterior coming into existence. Still translucent but slowly cementing. I can see the past and the present and the itching anxiety of the future. And at its stoop sits change.
— M Train ; Patti Smith
— R.F Kuang, Time Magazine article on Olivia Rodrigo