September

Oh great.

it's September 5th, and it's quite evident that fall has fallen on Ohio.

So what's the big deal? Leaves changing? Cold weather? Holidays?

Well, to be honest, it's a combination of all of those, plus a little history of what happened to me last fall.

Let's attack these things one by one. The cool weather at night is just throwing me back to Colorado summer nights. It's quite obvious that I miss my mountains like crazy, and now this chill in the air just makes it worse. I can almost feel myself driving up 285 up into the stratosphere after dark with the heat on in the car, just looking at the cross lit up on the mountain side as I pass.

Making this one worse is the fact that this weather, and my remembrance of Colorado, is flooding my head with Paramore's Riot album. Earlier this year, that album helped me make sense of a lot of confusion, but before that it was one of my favorite albums while I lived in Colorado. Their song "Decode" from the Twilight soundtrack was what hooked me on the band, and it's in part due to the video for the song. The band is surrounded by beautiful landscapes and conifer trees, and I would watch this video at our house in Conifer Colorado and look out the window, marveling at how the scenery looked similar.



I got into Twilight because Sarah was the head of the YA department at the Evergreen branch of the Jefferson County Public Library System. When the movie came out, she took me to see it, as well as the two sequels that followed. I bought her the movie, and on the DVD was the video to Decode. So in a way, this all ties back to the relationship, and I wouldn't have even BEEN in Colorado to experience that beautiful scenery if it weren't for her. I'm not sad by that right now, that's dead and gone and I've moved on. It's an interesting parallel to what I've lost though, and a great segue into the next part of what's wrong with the weather turning cold.

So here I am listening to Paramore, feeling the cold air on my neck from the open window behind me, and missing my mountains. So I start watching videos I'd posted on youtube that I shot around the time that I moved from Colorado to Ohio. They are as follows:







This got me thinking of the move itself, and giving up my mountains for the promise of cheaper cost of living and hopefully turning the relationship around. Sarah had been hired at a new job, and I was to attend Ohio State to get a business degree. I was going to put my life in order, and we'd be happy together.

But alas it was in October of last year that Sarah first started showing signs that she was looking for a way out. I started sleeping on the EZ chair to give her space, and even moved out for a few weeks until I realized that I couldn't afford to do that and had to move back in shortly after. So for me, this fall is the first time that the weather has matched the time that my life as I knew it began to crumble away. The foundation cracked when I lost my mountains, and when Sarah started to show doubts it was like putting stress on an unstable structure.

This will all lead up to what I predict will be a difficult time for me, and I hate that. I love the holidays, and especially LOVE Halloween. But the last Halloween I went through was very unpleasant. Sarah and I had a tradition of carving pumpkins and watching a horror movie marathon while eating all the candy we bought for the kids who never showed. Last year was shaping up like any other Halloween, we even went to a pumpkin farm off of 40 that we used to go to every year when we lived here before just so we could buy pumpkins to carve. But then she started showing her doubts in the relationship and started asking for her space to figure things out. Those pumpkins sat on the front porch till Thanksgiving and were never carved. I eventually threw them in the garbage, and they had rotten in the frost.

It's not that I long to carve a pumpkin again and watch a horror movie. It's that the holidays in general were a special time for the two of us. We had our traditions. It'll be hard to fathom doing things differently this year, but what choice do I have? It's not that I even want to do those things with her anymore, but the entire holiday season is shaping up to be a huge reminder of what I've lost. From the relationship that I thought would never end, to my holiday traditions, to my ties to members of her family that I considered my own family, and even to my mountains. I've lost all of that in the change of a mind.

So for me, the cold weather coming back, and the talk of Halloween, it's all just a giant flashback to everything that went wrong over the last 18 months. I'm looking forward to making new traditions in life and moving on, but I'm not looking forward to the constant reminders of what I've lost plastered all over everyone's houses in the forms of Halloween and Christmas decorations. I'm looking forward to seeing how I weather this oncoming storm, but I'm not looking forward to the wind and the rain.