Shifting ✔

...

I met her when it was autumn.

That was the time of year she was at her best, all red-orange hair and crackling laughter. The time when there was a lot of spooky in her, and a lot of play. All the subtle strength and warmth of a campfire on a mid-November evening. The time of year when all the old things left this plane with grace and transcendent beauty - what would make a better time for falling?

It took the first few years for me to notice. Something shifting, so slightly, as if someone had moved every object in your house half an inch to the left. Correct, yes, but not quite the usual. The winter makes us all cold, and the summer places us all a little out of our heads. I just loved her. It was as simple as that. I just loved her, because she was amazing, and I was the luckiest person alive.

I realized, after those first few years, that spring came with sudden bursts of cold. Summer raged often in fire spouting from her lips. Winter was the worst of all, with the deadness of her eyes and the distance consistently left, intentionally, between us. It was just that autumn embraced us differently, throwing herself into it without the clingy sweat of summer. I used to love that summer girl, her hair wild and her mind unhinged, the way she took on any risk she could. The love for the craziness faded. It does in all of us at some point. Maybe I carried her home one too many times, maybe I cleaned up one too many messes made for the sake of feeling the sensation of burning. I just couldn't stand her in the winter. The shutdown and isolation, the blizzard in her head diminishing her visibility. Unable to tell me what was wrong and unable to think I would ever actually listen.

I loved the autumn girl, but she still comes home, hair bleached white and a fainter smile on her lips than when she left. The ice and darkness of winter had returned. The shadowy parts of her cast shadows downward, looming like icicles over her head. We kiss with her body held at a distinct distance. She makes polite conversation and we go to bed early. Separate sides of the bed. The cold lengthens the space between us.

It is a lonely season. Winter is cold. Winter is dark, and winter is ice and unpleasantness, and a desire for time indoors with warmth from a soul unable to give it. She is not the girl I loved in the autumn when I look at her, although they share the same face. She was the first lady I loved so much I thought my heart would shatter from the strength of it. I couldn't leave her if I wanted to. I wake her with crying and she tells me to quiet my sorrows and go back to sleep. Winter is different. It is a lonely season.

Three days after I woke her with my thoughts, I stare at myself in the mirror. Part of me always wonders if it was actually myself that was changing. I wonder if it's me. If the extra weight around my thighs or the shape of my eyes or the color of my lips or the way that a dress suits my figure determines her coldness. I try more expensive clothing, spend more time on my makeup, learn to cook more than three meals and how to use a curling iron. I try more. I try harder. She just looks at me in that same dead stare, neither appreciating nor condemning my actions. As with everything in winter, whatever I do is separate from her.

I lost it when the thaw began. The temperature hit 50 degrees and I cracked with the ice. We argue, from the station to the train to the restaurant to the train to the station. It's always the little things, because insignificant issues are easier to argue over than anything we wish our words actually said. I say she doesn't love me and she says I'm not listening. Old scabs are picked, and the words bleed out of our mouths and onto the floor. I sleep on the couch.

It was 2am when I heard her crying, the kind of deep, wracked sound you only get when someone is hurting in the early hours when the whole world seems asleep. I hold her hand, her cold meeting my warmth, and she meets my eyes for what feels like the first time since autumn left. "I'm sorry," she whispers. "I'm sorry that I'm - that I'm like this. I'm different in the winter. I don't try to be." She stares at the blankets and a tear splashes down in the silence. "I know this isn't me. Why do you think I always dye my hair, chop it off impulsively?"

Silence.

"I'm sorry you married four of me."

I spent most of my spare time after that at the library. There aren't any real books on how to love someone with seasonal affective disorder, so I decide to write my own. Sticky notes and napkins scribbled with words and lessons from situations we would all rather not acknowledge but that some of us live with each and every day. I read between the lines and write what I learn on spare pages.

She comes home to her favorite dinner and flowers. We kiss and she seems uneasy, but that's okay. The next day she finds little love notes in her pockets. I surprise her with lunch at work on the next. Our love is quiet, to match winters silence, and I understand. Her sex drive falters, so we spend more time cuddling. We stock up on red wine and cheesy romance movies, and parts of her start to relax.

You cannot love someone out of mental illness. But you can love them despite it, loud enough to make them laugh and soft enough to quell their fears. Love them large enough to make them believe they have a way out of it. You will learn, and so will they.

And I learn. And I fall in love with all of her, every season, all over again. In spring she softens, and the sharp edges are there when the temperature dips, but we go on picnics in fancy dresses and dip strawberries in chocolate. I adore the way she tries to get the sparrows to land on her finger and entices the robins to our yard with an excessive number of feeders. The way her feet splash through puddles and the way she threads flowers through her hair. I love summer and her slow walks through green parks, milkshakes in the evening, and screaming to music we play far too loudly and know far too few words of. I fall in love with her fire, and when winter comes with cold, we're both ready. I remember childhood snows that used to gleam too bright in the sunlight, and how even in the darkest days of the year the sun finds a way to light a path for us. I see the way frost makes patterns like lace across our windows and how wind leaves her cheeks red, and I love the way she smiles so slowly and so shyly.

She comes home with her white hair and a package in her hands. I ask her what's inside it, and the shy smile comes creeping out. There's three little bottles packed with medication and receipt from the pharmacy. "I'm trying to get better," she mumbles. "I promise."

Mental illness isn't pretty, and recovery doesn't complete itself on a set schedule. Sometimes it isn't neat. There is still more cold in winter and too much heat in summer, but she spreads her autumn leaves through all her seasons and leaves the best parts of herself in everything she does. We still fight, and the words still don't always reach us like we want them too. But we love each other like we should. She takes the silence of winter before shouting in summer, takes autumns warmth to the chills of spring. We learn.

She comes home, maybe a few months later, maybe a few years. The seasons don't matter when their trends are misaligned. Her hair is different, a style I'm not used to; it has none of the length of summer, the starkness of winter, the bounce of spring, the style of autumn. Its mid length and a shade of strawberry blonde darker than white but lighter than auburn. I kiss her forehead and tell her that she's beautiful, and my heart swells with the fact that she's mine and I am thankful for all of her. I am the luckiest woman on earth, and I always have been, and it clicks somewhere deep in the cavities of my brain that this is what love is. Sometimes it takes work to find out how the thing you planted will prove to grow.

You cannot love away a flaw in genetics or brain chemistry. You cannot love the best parts more than the worst. Love is taking the thing, as it is, as the whole. No dicing or splicing or welding pieces together. It is, and it will continue to be. Real love does not change you. It takes your summers and your winters in stride, until you find the balance that suits you. It is a comfort to fall back on, to push off of on your quest to better yourself. Not always an emotion, but your actions, the things that we do in the moments when we realize the void that exists in our lives should the object of our affections disappear.

It is falling in love in autumn, and staying there until the spring.