A Mother's Air

I walked along beside the road, crunching dried orange leaves littering the sidewalk. Evening was coming but it was already dark. A storm could have been waiting. The air was cold and sharp and when I breathed it in it was fresh. Not clouded with barbecues, or laughs, or thick with heat and freedom. No, it was restricting and comforting all at once. A mother's air.

My hair knocked around in the breeze. A long tattered parachute, filling and emptying with each stride, each passing car.

I had been sitting at my empty house all day, filling out paperwork and staring out the window. Over the past few weeks I had begun to feel more and more like a shut in. The neighborhood recluse. Shuffling patterns into the carpet and keeping the hours of some Lovecraftian mad man. But I played no cosmic nightmare anywhere other than in my head. I was beginning to go mad alone and unnoticed. Locked up in the wood paneling of my living room, illuminated by the glow of blank pages on my computer screen. Things were fine. I wasn't.

So, I decided I needed to get the fuck out of the house.

I dug my coat out of the closet, put head phones in my ears, and let a sad man sing me sad songs while I tried to cheer myself up.

The trees were baring. Little by little their oranges and yellows and reds were falling away revealing only thin grey skeletons. People always saw leaves, never trees.

The street lamps hadn't come on yet. It left the world in a state similar to abandonment. There were no cars. No people on porches. Only myself, and the air around me. I stared up at the sky. The peaks of roofs scraping gently against it. It's clouds were motionless, grey and white, thick and endless. I loved autumn, but it was never any good for me. As I walked I thought about the weight it placed on my chest every year. The inescapable sadness. I tried to figure it out. Sure, there were things in my life that had happened in the fall, but I didn't think it was that. There had been plenty of shit in other seasons. Perhaps it was the death of everything. The dying leaves. The dying summer. The dying carelessness. I couldn't put my finger on it.

I had walked almost a mile, and came to a bench. As I approached it, I flipped a coin in my head. Sit, or walk.

I sat.

The bench was cold against the back of my pants, but it was nice to sit and let the air settle around me. Together, we stared out at the skyline of the town and wondered if there was love in those windows. Or regret. Or indifference, perhaps the saddest of them all. The Air and I looked out at our world and I thought: I am okay.

You are, the Air thought back to me.

I sat on the bench until my hands went numb, and then the Air escorted me home in silence, patting my back every once in a while, letting me know that it was always there, I wasn't alone.