rain in autumn

It's been raining all day.  Not very hard: if it were any colder, it would have been light snow all day.  Just a soft pitter-patter on the pavement.  Grey and gloomy - mid-fall.

I love it.  It's peaceful and contemplative.  It's tranquil.  Rain never sounds rushed or frantic.  It is always 

steady.  Always careful.

The wind is soft tonight, too.  Sometime it whistles between houses, but mostly tonight it just shakes the rain off the leaves, gently, gently.

Someone across the street has a windchime on their front porch.  The wind is so gentle that they chime only lightly, so quietly, though their chiming is regular.  Sometimes it will stop for a moment, but it always starts up again.

Cars splash by on the artery road to the south every once in a while, or I hear them distantly on the main road ten blocks west, but it is nearly one in the morning, and this is a small city.  There are few cares on the road at this time of night.

This is a peaceful time, a tranquil time, but it is not necessarily a happy time.  I feel very alone; my housemates are all sleeping soundly; my boyfriend is many miles away; my closest network is disintegrating.  I am too busy to feel.  So I take this time to write when I could be sleeping - because if I don't write, this moment will be lost.  This is autumnal melancholy.  The end of some things; the hibernation of others.  This rain, this wind, the chimes - they all form parts of a lament for things ending and things never begun.  They whisper of dreams killed, of illusions broken, of hopes dashed.  This is not a happy night.

But it is peaceful, and tranquil.  I yet exist.  I yet feel.

How odd it is that our year of work begins in the death of the year.  We return to our studies, we send our children away as the leaves fall: late summer's shining optimism segues smoothly into autumn's slow beautiful death; we hold each other close through mid-winter's deep, dark cold, though in our hearts we both despise and love the company; we end things in the spring and spend the summer dreaming about the lives we'd like to have.  But we always fall down.

What to do?  This is beautiful melancholy.  There is great beauty in honourable sorrow.  I am an artist: my work is relevant and fertile in every season, for my task is to set in front of you yourself: the mirror you thought you knew .  The mirror formed by the rain spattering on the black pavement, orange light skittering in your vision, reflected from the streetlight in the shivering, dripping, scattering rain.  The mirror you don't want to see, because it shows you as you are, not as you show yourself to be.  The chimes sing, the rain falls, the wind sighs ...