Funny, the way we so easily think we’re in love. 

You’re always scared to admit hard truths to yourself. You fetishize your sadness, yet you always dread it. You can feel yourself sinking into who you were a year ago; it’s almost as if you lose yourself each day along with the sun. It’s autumn, and daylight is becoming shy. Each walk home brings more leaves underfoot and memories of the months when you thought nothing would change. You think you’re in love—what else could that feeling be? You-of-two-years-ago might not have been swept up in the illusion of comfort and enduring love that aroused You-of-one-year-ago. But You-of-now doesn’t know what to think anymore. You have been both proven wrong and shown otherwise to the point where being sad is easier. You are going to end up there eventually. Why run the race if you could just wait at the finish line? Is it that you enjoy the finish? The end that makes you feel like never beginning again? No—you do dread it. So why do you always let yourself reach it? Why not just keep running?

Your life moves in an odd way. A story that furcates before an inevitable convergence in which the past few months are made clear. Autumn is your favorite season. You open your window, play Cigarettes After Sex on CD, light your incense, eat olives, and write poems about this sadness. Autumn is the season for love. It must be something about the early sunsets that look like affection and the breeze that feels like longing. Your life is constant in knowing that stability is fleeting. One moment the love of your life is the subject of all that you write. The next, you’re rereading those words wondering why you let any of it happen, and questioning how you once managed to be happy. The more you look back, the more this fetishization develops. This idolization of a feeling so tragic—yet so comfortable—you can’t help but to sink into it. You know what to expect; feeling sorry for yourself. It’s easier than working to be happy.

Your life is a cycle of not knowing and looking back. It might be that the two are acting in tandem so that you never know what is happening in your life—spending all your time reminiscing on what you missed. You always think that you know more than you did a year ago, and maybe that’s true, but you can’t help thinking about how much you don’t know now. It took you months to admit that one relationship was not the dream it felt like. It took you months to get over the fact that you would never get that effort back. It took you months to realize that it’s okay to want better—and maybe those months were worth it. But why couldn’t you just figure it out from the beginning? 

You’re in love. You’re always enamored of one person or another. And maybe it’s okay to fall this easily, but you should always remember how hurt you were last time. And the time before, or the time last summer when you knew they never really liked you. Right now, in this moment, you think, “I am in love.” Somehow, it always comes with sadness. A worry singing softly in the background; humming. And the more you love, the louder the song gets. Eventually, your mind is howling a ballad of lament and failure. 

Love sounds different when it’s screaming in your head.

But have fun! Don’t forget to be a teenager and live your life. Make stupid choices that will turn into fond memories and great stories! See, despite this being what you hear, you are also being told about the importance of relationships. You spent months giving your all to people because you thought that’s how one takes care of a relationship. You thought the fun would come later. After you resolve the trauma, and address the problems, maybe you will reap such delicate rewards! But the fun never came because there were too many problems, and too much trauma. This made it easier to be sad. If you accept the unchangeable flaws of love, it makes it easier to embrace the sadness. 

How comfortable life becomes when you stop trying to do something impossible. Something like being happily in love; an oxymoron, really. When most of your time has been spent worrying about relationships, you forget they’re supposed to involve love.

This autumn, you are hopeful. This autumn will be unlike last year, or any other autumn before. You will be happy. You will be in love. And the song screaming in your head is not about lament and failures, but flowers, and infinity.