Things will happen to you in autumn, and you will not know the extent of what they have altered within you until two springs have passed and two summers are folded into monsoon. You will think you have a tally of what has changed, but there is always something more beneath what everyone else, including you, can see. You will find yourself sitting on a familiar couch, surrounded by people you have known all your life, and something within you will scream: get up; get up and move; if you don’t, you will be stuck here for the rest of your life.
So, you get up. You get up, get a cab and leave. You will stop at a café and sit by yourself, but you will have left. That will make all the difference. In life, this will happen over and over again. You must get up and leave each time. There is no other way. You rarely ever ask for it: to outgrow whatever you call life or other people. You simply do. When that happens, everything echoes wrong in your head. Everything alarms you. But someone has to get off the couch first. And when you sit there, feigning interest in the same things you have talked about a thousand times and pretending laughter at jokes that don’t crack you up anymore, you will know it is you.
And then, as you sit by yourself, you will think of things you could not talk about, and for the most part, the thinking will be enough. Even if it were not, you would have already gotten off the couch. You will think you know what this has changed. Until years later, you will sit somewhere else, doing something completely different, and you will remember this again. It may be in the August that comes next, or one that comes a decade later. But you will remember getting off the couch. That is all you’re going to remember. That will make all the difference.