Not a Perfume. A Memory.💌

I've Never Actually Had a Fall

Everything I know about autumn is secondhand.

Every fall post I've ever written has been secondhand. I've never actually felt the air change. Everything I know about autumn came from a movie, a playlist, someone else's boots-and-scarf flat lay — an entire season I've been writing about my whole life without once living through it.

I'm about to, for real, in a few weeks. And I don't actually know what I'm expecting, now that I try to name it. Something about the light changing. Something about needing a coat for the first time and not owning one that's actually built for real cold, not the kind I've been calling "cold" my whole life. I keep picturing it like the movies — golden leaves, a specific kind of grey sky — and I have no idea yet whether any of that is even accurate, or just the aesthetic version I've absorbed without ever testing it against anything real.

right now, fall is still just a rumor to me

There's a strange kind of pressure in that. Fall has a whole mood attached to it before I've even met it — wistful, cozy, a little melancholic — and I don't know if I'll actually feel any of that, or if I'll just feel cold and confused and homesick in a season I don't have any instinct for yet. I don't know what my body does in weather like that. I don't know if the light really changes the way everyone says it does, or if that's just something people say because they read it somewhere too.

I think that's the part I actually want to hold onto before it happens — not the aesthetic, the not-knowing. In a few months I'll have an actual answer, real memory instead of borrowed footage, and I won't be able to get this particular kind of blank back. Right now fall is still just a rumor to me. That's not going to be true again after this year.

Ask me again once I've actually felt it.

xo, journaled