It makes me chuckle as the last night of September slowly passes me by. It’s fantastic how another year has passed. I look at my hand as this thought catches me off guard. I touch the desk, which was not even here when I found myself on the ground after a gazillion attempts to not fall. But all of us fall, and all of us stand up again. I think of all the words I have written while sitting here at this desk and how I have watched the seasons change, one after the other, and now here we are: it is autumn again. I had decided to do things differently around twenty-five days from this day last year. It seems all within the time it takes for me to blink, I now face the fruits of my little attempt. Fortunately, things seem to have gone my way. Things have changed for the better. Life is a gamble, of course. It could have gone either way. Everyone must celebrate when they make a decision, and it works out, regardless of whether it was some display of skill, hidden genius or just plain old luck.
I don’t know which of those it was in my case, but I am not for empty arguments anymore. If all my happiness results from a wild stroke of luck, then be that as it may. I do not much care. I am only grateful for it. When you reach a certain age, you do not much care how things happen to you, and indeed, you understand there is no glory or vanity alike in being revered as the one who makes things happen. Things happen with or without my touch. I only happen to have an urgent disposition. But things would happen, even if I were not the way I am. It is juvenile to ponder about and, worse, to believe the cause of all in your life is you. Things are too complex as they stand, and the best we can do is take what we get and be quiet about it. And so, as I sit on this September midnight, writing, I bask in the soft satisfaction before we step into the month I most enjoy and, in some ways, equally dread.
All my life begins and ends in October. Everything that has changed for me has changed right before it, and all that I change myself has happened right after. October, the auburn beginning of the end, already ashen, already dead.