Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past even while we attempt to define it.
I'm another year older. We're one week away from the start of the new school year. Fall encroaches on summer as the nights become crisp with that familiar, cozy chill. I'm not afraid of the number. After all, age is relative and heaven help me, I'm still waiting to get wiser. Back to school brings with it a welcome return to routine on which I thrive. Bring it on! And autumn is synonymous with comfort in my world. I welcome the cool, colorful days of harvest. October is my favorite month of the year...each and every year. So I'm sitting here trying to come to terms with this persistent sense of gentle sadness I've come to know as melancholy that visits me from time to time without warning or invitation. I know her well. Her vacant eyes haunt me as she pitifully stares me down, and her musty scent follows me wherever I go like the lingering of a smoldering campfire doused with water. She sneaks in when the door's been left ajar and sucks a little of the joy out of the present as she reminds me of what is lost...what is passed. Even as I know to the core of my being that the past is filled with treasures and gifts that I carry with me into the future, I feel robbed, looted, even weary. This misery: it's all she knows. We all know what they say about misery: it sure loves company.
Middle age: it doesn't scare me, but I'm not so sure about old age. Honestly, I'm not quite sure how exactly to even define old age. Ask me in a few years. Kids in elementary school become college bound before we know it. Fall festivities become holiday festivities and then before long we're shut ins for half a cold, dark year. This is how melancholy slyly steals from the sweet fruit of what is to come...she gives us an acrid taste of fast forward fear. She doesn't mean to, but she only knows how to look back longingly to mourn as she softly moans missing the only relevant moment...this one. In that very moment, the trepidation is paralyzing, and then the moment is gone...gone forever. I used to think that melancholy was my muse, but now I know she's nothing but a manipulating thief. A miserable masquerader.
That's why I've been mute. I'm refusing to give her a voice this time. Quietly, I'm opening my eyes and taking in so much of the beauty in the here and now all around me, and slowly I'm convincing her to pack up her suffocating shrouds and move on because I'm onto her.
She's not getting any more of my marrow. I'm on board to live all the moments of my life.
Today I'm participating in Tuesdays Unwrapped.
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