Ascending Heaven

Happy accidents

Birds are chirping and the gentle autumn breeze embraces your face, one that has already started to lose its tan. The days have turned shorter, darker, colder – much earlier than ever before, or so it feels to you. It's odd, things feel different, emptier. Colors are greyer.

Some things never change, like the leaves that turn to shades of orange, some already falling off the branches, but the scenery still, in its decaying form resembles a painting from the better days. But even with the weather getting harsher, the golden sun smiling down onto earth is still enough to keep the air comfortably warm, allowing the most dedicated ones to keep dressing in their tiny crop tops and thin, colorful cardigans.

Halloween is right around the corner, the sideways and porches quickly filling up with carved, bright orange pumpkins, and of course, the myriad of different decorations; like those plastic skeletons and zombies rising from the dirt and neatly mowed lawns.

On your way home, or more like; your dorm room, with each step you keep reminding yourself of its temporality. One more year, it would pass quickly. One day you'd wake up and all of this would be over.

You walk past a group of kids gossiping and giggling about their costume ideas for later today, and you can't help but to overhear the obvious classics: witches, little riding hoods and super mans. A smile takes place on your face, the group reminding you of the golden times of your own childhood. The good old times. That is if you try your hardest to ignore the parts that weren't so peachy.

You sound like an old lady. You shake off the thought.

Fall has always been your favorite season next to summer, and not only cause of the weather but Halloween too, even now as a so-to-say-grown-up.

It's friday, you have the weekend off school, free from studying; you had promised to relax, but as a full-time student there's pretty much no way to acquire true peace, not really. It's not only Samhain that's due.

Growing up in a small town where everyone knew one another, their cousins and for fucks sake, even their best friend's pet rock by name, caused you to be grateful for the fact that in this new town you were just a stranger to most. That, oh so, mysterious someone who they could get a glimpse of, never figuring out more than they were given. You prefer to stay in your own company, just making a few friends out of your classmates.

After cutting almost all ties to your hometown, you try your best to forget about the past.

It no longer haunts you like it used to.

Even with all those new people around you, after that desired fresh start in life, there is, still, this massive, unfillable hole in your chest that keeps leaking, leaving an ugly print everywhere you go. To fill it, you tried men, women too, quickly learning how it only made you feel worse about yourself. Alcohol, those fifty-fifty cocktails did the job for a bit, made you forget and bear the agony of being alive. Studying and working so hard that you did not have any extra time to get lost in thought, but God, it made you so damn tired, an empty, burned out shell. But guess for that exact reason everything, for a moment, was perfectly fine. It did its job. And you were fine.

You slowly started to understand the people back home – though you didn't want to. The thought made you disgusted, despise yourself a little more each day. You would never be like them.

Chasing after something you cannot name or place, you lost the grip for a bit. But it's fine, too, you'd always land on your feet. Mom said that once, you think. You're holding too much, where would you put it?

Sometimes you think about calling home. You almost pick up the phone.

You didn't.

Who would answer, anyway?