October

I love October.

I love the weather, I love the leaves, I love the smell of the air, I love jackets and football and potentially the fair and the feel of the end of the year when we leave the discomforting heat of the summer for the quiet peaceful cold of the autumn and winter.

I love the wind that blows in when October comes. It makes the dark magic of Halloween plausible, it stirs up the mind and makes the heart race as it rips through jackets and steals the comforting warmth of normality, it stirs up the world around us to make us believe in ghosts and fairies and wishes. I love being lost in the memories of far away places where dreaming such dreams doesn't seem so delusional.

October makes me want to write. It makes me want to pull out my quilt and curl up in a chair on my porch, watching the leaves change and fall while my pen races across another page. I could almost stay out there all day and into the night, warming my hands with coffee as ideas pour out of my mind, the paper filled with ghouls that remove my stories far enough from reality to be recognized.

Or I could, you know, sit at my computer all day watching Youtube videos and catching up on TV (I'm halfway through season 6 of How I Met Your Mother! Don't tell me what happens at the beginning of this season!). I could spend my evening hours worrying about when I'm going to get things done and whether I'm doing a good enough job and what I'm going to do next year (next year? next year? I have a job 'til August, let's not rush into things here). I could drag every hour down with the general guilt of laziness and apathy, which is surprisingly easy to do. Or I could just play the one song I know on the piano over and over again while glancing over at my guitar and wondering if I'm ever going to learn to play something on it.

It's a choice we have to make everyday, the choice to live perfectly acceptable lives of normalcy and productivity, or the choice to allow ourselves to live a little of the magic that our minds are capable of imparting to the world in which we live, to smile that sardonic smile at the banal beauty of everyday life and know that behind our eyes, we are seeing something more. And I don't think there's a wrong answer.

I just think there's a normal one.