She wanted to sink into the city. There is a sort of transparency here, a luminosity; the trees are gray, as blank as doves, and alight. They are bony and balding, their little snippets of red and orange hair hanging by tips. Roads seem to sparkle in the dim fog. Now the mornings are like weak coffee, dark and without substance.
Driving through the night with him, she thought that the car ride mustn't end, not here. The fall is too glamorous, the landscape too greedy for souls, the wind far too quick and the car interior far too heavy.
Fall brings all sorts of little memories to call. The smell of leaves ushers in visions of blanket tents, the dawn of early runs in the prime of high school days. Everywhere the world is calm and in hiding, idle thoughts the only live beings in this dying world. But yet, it is pleasant; there is a joy in this season.
She wants to watch this movie. Badly. For some reason it seems seasonal and appropriate. There are unicorns and fond times of mothers baking fall treats, and ponderings of where the wild things are.
She turned her ankle in a Cross Country race and got to ride in a silly little golf cart. It's only a little sprain--a wee, tiny one. She never thought that she'd miss running a race so badly. It was a hard thing. But life is full of all sorts of hard things, and lessons can be learned if one is true and wise.
This brings about a decision for thinking on. Shall she continue to run, or be swept away to the city?
She's home now, too, for a little while. Nothing so much has changed; it doesn't smell like fall here. Winter came prematurely. She likes the smell better in her apartment in the south-land. She also misses her prince.
She's also decided that dear Edward Scissorhands must be a very sad and lonely fellow indeed. His story made her eyes sting with salt and think of crystalline walks on silent winter evenings. And if she should ever have liked an old-man actor, she would choose Vincent Price. At least he likes cookies.
Oh, do smell that?
The house is beginning to come alive! The musty corners are fretting and retreating; mother has made pumpkin pie. Tonight there is also noodles and sauce, bread and faux sausages. Little by little the sun creeps away and the pumpkin-orange decorative lights turn on. The branches outside are shivering, shirking.
There is a coziness here, one not present in the girl's apartment. There is a serenity, a monotony. Instead of the old man that lives upstairs and goes to work at 5am, there are cats mewing and an early-rising father. The latter are far quieter and a little more sympathetic to sleeping ears.
She has missed the simple, heavy joy of returning home. She shan't get used to it for long. Tomorrow she will be whisked away again in a silver car. Home, never change.
Ever.
If there ever was a constant in one's life, it must be in this house, she thought. It must be here, tucked in the far north-land, in a wash-out suburbia with sidings the color of dishwater.
Here is a place for the stories in my head--the endless little tales of wicked woodlands and conflicted gentlemen that waltz their way into my daydreams.
