I sat on my porch for a few hours tonight, reading until it got too dark. So I layed down and watched the sky go from a medium blue to a swirly dark navy. Sometimes if I stare at the sky long enough it feels so far and intangible that my eyeballs make it into a bunch of tiny specs all squished together. The funny thing is, I never feel like I’m inside something. Indoors, I often feel a sort of suffocation. Indoors, is a place, a thing, a location, with stuff in it, and I am a person who is in the kitchen, a chef of sorts, or a secretary typing notes or an artist spilling ideas or a lover surrounded by kisses and skin. Some of these things I like to be and need to be. I need to be tucked into small spaces sometimes, where I can feel big and make others feel big and meaningful and loved in a warming hug kind of way and defined by the occupancy I choose to take. But then I have an ever longing to be outdoors, within the air and the quiet. Outside I feel small. Outside we are almost all the same, almost naked. I feel a nothingness, a miniscule piece of nothing standing in a space with no walls except those fabricated by the sky. I feel reset. A refresh. Alone. I feel surrounded by things that are only because physics calls them to be so and not because I made them that way. There is no one but me and the things that are bigger than I. I feel where I am and what I do doesn’t matter, and I am nothing to no one, but only a force that moves with or against the wind, not even making a seeming difference to the wind itself, and bound to nothing but nature itself. Reasoning is gone, reasons are gone. Plans disappear alongside facts and history and my history and everything goes. Everything goes, and only love remains. Only the feeling that I cannot and must not hurt the ones I love, remains. Everything else is still.

Fall is a conscious, helpless, slow death, filled with last hopes and adventurous dreams. A passionate kiss goodbye. A last night out before departure. A calm settling into that which you know must occur. With more beauty than if these things were not true.