There is an image I hold in my heart; a reality which I cling to in those moments when I want nothing more than to scream and run and curl into a ball and hide and explode and never look back or face the vast horrible crazy empty fullness of the world around me. In my mind, in my mind when all that is me wants to weep tears from every fibre of my being, I find myself at the edge of a cliff. I extend my arms, and I close my eyes, and I take a moment to notice the air is warm and soft around me as I simply let go. I do not jump, I do not step forward: one moment my feet cling to the edge and the next I am free and I am falling into the most safe and warm and wonderful atmosphere imaginable. And what lies below, I do not know--but I know that in the falling, I am cherished, and I am safe, and I am out of reach of all that would tear my soul to shreds. In the falling, I have choice, and I surrender it completely with the entirety of my body and soul.

And all outside, the world is screaming at me. All outside, there is the rude, condescending jabber of customers, the angered frustration of family, the greedy reachings of friends, the confused wantyou-don'twant of boyfriends-in-leaving, the careless anarchy of a world where I matter less than a dried smear of avocado on the floor. And yet, inside, my soul is a peace--released to a world of falling into sunshine, into starlight, into liquid surrender.

And then there are those of us whose hands and arms are mottled with snaking scars of deep purple and silver, with bruises roughening the knuckles and bloodied smears for cuticles. We don't know how we came by these because we were so involved in the doing that the small, ugly costs of that involvement never occurred until too late.
This is true in my life, and yet not true enough. How is it that I simply cannot dive so fully and so deeply into what truly matters in life, bearing those scars with joy and pride and a deep sense of satisfaction in the same way that I relish the markings of physical achievement?

All crisp and Right, all the way to my bones

There's something about Autumn that makes me feel clean in a way that nothing else ever quite does. There is a certain rawness to the air, a certain vulnerability which clings to the dying warmth of summer and bleeds out until Winter saunters in. I can be alive in my brokenness; I can be whole in my deadened senses. While all the world is dying around me and fluttering to the ground in a brittle last sigh, my soul awakes and surges in sheer wonder at being reborn after a long sauna of a summer.

In some ways, it seems as though I am finally waking up after a year of North Carolina--a very long, sleepy, haze-filled year. I was in too many places last year, despite staying in North Carolina the whole time. My mind was wandering worlds, and while it still roams the universe and foreign soil indiscriminately even today, the difference is that last year it did not know how to find it's way home, because home was in too many dimensions. This year, there is a home to return to. Surprisingly, that home is Cary--home for happy little socialite wanna-be-southerners-but-still-wanna-be-yankees-too upper-class American Dream Caryites. I'm not bitter, I promise. I'm amazed at the back-seat my snobishness is taking in allowing myself to settle here. But the truth is, I know that there is a time--coming soon, much sooner than I suspect, I imagine--when I will look back on these days (these cooling, flickering Autumn evenings of spice on the wind and crunch underfoot) and I will miss them, in that oddly tender way that I miss too many things and too many places. I thought the last of my childhood was stripped in Podunajske Biskupice. I was wrong: I think Cary lets me be a child still, but I know that time is coming to a close.

For now, though--for now, I will pay my dues at work, and pay my dues to school and loans, and in any time that is left, I will shirk responsibility for house and home and will instead flee to my outdoors--where my sun and my clouds and adventure await, loping alongside me like a favourite dog. I will have sleepovers and stay up far too late watching films and talking over a bottle of wine and pudding. I will disappear for hours to spend with my boyfriend. And I will know that I am merely racing against time--it is the Autumn of my childhood, for there's no knowing which day you will wake up and find it Winter. But after all, Autumn is the most alive time of year--my childhood awaits, crisp and bright and spicy on the nighttime air. I tuck my arms in closer and shove my hands deep into the pockets of my jacket and I walk briskly into the chilling embers of summer. It is so easy to be alive sometimes.

All those years past, dealing with people in situations that had potential to harm me? I was a twat.

would it have killed me to let someone in on occasion?

Perhaps it can be story time?

And I looked on my world, and I saw its silence: in the cool glens of my academics, where vocabulary and physics equations doze side-by-side as they never did before, vulnerable and cuddling in their sudden abandonment; in the soft, murmured fluttering of city-maps beneath the soil of time, where construction and change have slowly dug a grave for landmarks once known; and in the solemn watchful gaze of smiles and laughter reserved for moments in the past, and lingering hopefully for moments in the future.

I walked the misted paths, and wound my way through tundra and foliage, and came to squat next to a river of words, tumbling so swiftly across the landscape in so uniform a spray of English, Spanish, German, Japanese, Czech, Slovak--the dialects of this narcissistic universe--that their voices were the babbling of a brook, and their fusions were as little fish. I saw idly that some fish yet swam against this current, and as their "i"s switched furiously with their "y"s, a sentence bubbled out of the fray--insistent, demanding, with no hesitance or qualms about it. "Write, and do it now," came the angry accusation, as more fused words both joined and left the rebellious few in their upward journey. I sighed, and stroked one along the back of a ž as it squirmed into a t.

"Alright."

I work at a grocery store. I have nothing more to offer than my words. Do you care to listen?

Excuse ?

And why shouldn't it start right here, right now, this very second? Why wait a moment more?

A deep, but dazzling darkness

Were all my loud, evil days
Calm and unhaunted as is thy dark tent,
Whose peace but by some angel's wing or voice
Is seldom rent ;
Then I in Heaven all the long year
Would keep, and never wander here.

But living where the sun
Doth all things wake, and where all mix and tire
Themselves and others, I consent and run
To ev'ry mire ;
And by this world's ill-guiding light,
Err more than I can do by night.

There is in God—some say—
A deep, but dazzling darkness ; as men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear.
O for that Night ! where I in Him
Might live invisible and dim !

Henry Vaughn