The implication of change in the autumn which torments me

There is a girl made completely of my dreams who I get ahold of only through glimpses. I walk past a store mirror too quickly and see her, but go back for a second look only to see myself in her place. I see her sometimes in old candid photos taken by old friends I don’t remember now, in a time of my life I forget existed. I get confused because I’ve never seen these photos before but they somehow appear, Google-memory-suggested, just as I promised I wouldn’t stay up all night reminiscing again. I can’t lie, it’s quite alluring and unusual; the pop-up photos not the reminiscence. When I see her I know she’s the type of girl that sat on her mother’s lap and let her brush her hair, absent of what one could only presume is the rotten heart I was given. Heart attack-like symptoms never fill her up as she tries to be vulnerable, loved, and approached by ladybugs. 

Yes, ladybugs visit her individually, wishing her well, instead of infesting her home; crawling through her windows by the thousands, filling and tickling her lungs with their tiny legs and hard shells.

It was the end of winter and I was walking through my neighborhood for three weeks straight, drinking peach smoothies, never needing sleep, and holding my own hand. It was so synchronicitous, the way I had just been cropping myself out of every photo I was sent by anonymous characters of my past life. I had decided I would forget about this vision of a girl I longed for, but she appeared just then. Eventually though, my hand began to shake and clam up. Unstable, I lost grip of myself again. 

People like to say the fall is a time of growth and change, pointing to the leaves as if they’re some kind of role models. I like to believe they are when I’m at my worst. People like to say a lot of things. Someone told me the other day that I looked like an actress I’ve always resented for her ability to speak well and for her long legs. I don't have long legs, I just have a mole above my lip and hair that I dye three shades darker than my natural color. But when eating in the mornings makes me feel sick, my legs thin out, and someone points and says “hey, they seem longer.” So, maybe I do look like her those weeks.

There is a picture of myself at the age of fourteen that appears on my bookshelf every fall. She talks to me very cryptically, murmuring off poems or lyrics or passages from books I read ages ago. Sometimes though she simply tells me I need to draw more, consider a lifestyle change, and urges me to stay away from the friend that somehow always has car troubles only the boy I sleep with at night can help her with. She teases me for the way I love that boy so much. She claims won’t ever let herself be so messy, but as much as she has all the answers, I know some things she doesn’t. Sometimes, this framed younger me just disappears until I slip into some sort of fog of adult-ness. Every year I swear I'll listen to her, taker her advice as gospel,  so I don't have to slip. But I tend to slip.

This better me, this younger me, this adult-slippiness me. 

I don’t believe that the leaves are role models anymore. I think the appeal of fall is the whispers from the leaves you crunch on your afternoon walk.  You step and suddenly there are the words you've been trying to string together since the crunchiness of last year’s leaves. I think the leaves got me back for abusing them last year because my knee is all crunchy and crackling and I need to see a doctor. 

I press flowers in books, but they mold. I want to buy myself a flower press online but I don’t because my boyfriend said he would make me one. But, months pass and I still don’t have one so I rip out the moldy page and try again. I ask the framed picture on my shelf what she thinks I should do about my flower-press dilemma. She just shrugs. I stick my book full of sloppy flowers on my bookshelf and use it as an excuse to light a candle and never read again. I know the outcome of those flowers and still, I do it. Except right now, my mind aches for me to dig through the trash can and read what that crumpled up flower-smeared page I ripped out had to say. 

What if I unravel it and it gives me some kind of horrible revelation about my life? What if it says something like an answer to a question I’ve been asking myself and God. What if it’s just a story about some character I don’t give a shit about? Tells me I made a horrible mistake. Tells me I made a perfectly acceptable choice. Offers zero reassurance. Is blank. Isn’t even in my trash can anymore because I forgot I took my trash out a couple days ago.