Downward Trajectory

Autumn Inclinations

Spring/Autumn Essay Writing Contest response

“One kind of happiness is to know exactly at what point to be miserable.” — La Rochefoucauld

The nostalgic poison of summer’s silent death had already entered the bloodstream. There was no evading its melancholy virus from spreading inside. It had a way of attaching to every cell, every thought, every activity.

Sure, there were memories, photographs, and poetic fragments to harvest, but these fruits had a way of tasting bitter.

Autumn tends downward, towards death and winter.

But nostalgia was the easy part. Something much more tragic happened to give this dark red season an extra edge.

When my relationship with my mother busted like a broken limb, I had in my heart something I didn’t want to harvest.

It was a long time coming, a slow simmering failure that stewed well over two decades after my parents’ divorce.

Throw in a narcissistic stepfather into the mix, who was so insecure he felt he needed to insult my father to my face. The ideological depth and bigoted undertones of the insult made an irreversible crack destined to fracture the family fold.

Then the distance. The coldness. The indifference. The numbness. The pecuniary pain. Exile. Alienation.

Who is to say how a crooked, uneven tree will tilt and bitterly twist?

Depression has a way of making time slow down. The moments become heavier. Staring, drooping, vaguely listening…to nothing. It is thick and gooey, like blackstrap molasses, or manuka honey.

Sticky. Sticks to everything. Sticks to your thoughts, your actions, your moods. Doing the dishes becomes a discourse on melancholy.

As the weather started dropping down under, in late March, autumn began to unearth a deeper voice within me. My daimon began to emerge with some sobering words:

I want to come clean. I have made you with unachievable dreams. I made you into an error, into someone who makes bad financial decisions, and who chases impossible dreams. I made you into a fool.

I had no comeback for this bucket of ice-cold water. I had no defense, as my experience had borne out this quick, brutal summary. My cruel daimon didn’t stop there:

Why, you ask? Why did I make you into a fool this life? Maybe I wanted to experience being a fool and operate as such. I have my reasons. You are my experiment. It might be your life, but it’s mine to throw away.

And who am I to argue? I will lose the free will argument every time. I have never controlled any of my outcomes, and my best intentions often turn into my worst nightmares.

Autumn tends downward, heavy towards the earth. She succumbs to gravity, the weight of regret. Regret turns to inertia. Indifference even.

As life’s tragedies pile up, the mud of depression hardens, stabilizes, and becomes normalized. It writes certain lines on your face and settles into your eyes.

The news you read every day confirms your tragic disposition: the wars, climate change, bribed world leaders, and wealth inequality. The faces you walk past on the street on your way to work mirror your bitterness and bewilderment.

And on the train home. Broken faces. Haunted faces. One’s exhausted eyes glance up at mine as if to ask whether I have any better answers to this nuclear predicament we find ourselves in. Fuck if I know, I assure him with a resigned raise of my eyebrows.

Nobody has the answers. So we go home to harvest our incomprehension. We cook. We stare at the sad evening sky outside our window. We kill time in various ways.

We watch a film about people suffering. One night a Korean film, another night an Israeli film. Brutal realism. Actors that don’t even look like they are acting. And you feel better about it.

See, you tell yourself, my life isn’t any worse than theirs. The Buddhists were right: this life is a bed of thorns.

And this perverse logic somehow warms you up on this cold autumn night. You don’t have the answers to life’s cruel riddles. But you don’t need them. You will be dead soon, and none of this will matter.

My mother and I once felt something for each other, once took care of each other. But it turns out everything has its seasons, dawn and evening, birth and death.

Even kind people are sometimes destined to attack and hurt each other, to break up once and for all.

My wife and I understand each other without needing to say anything. Our days at work are written in our eyes and measured in the depth of our sighs. It is in the slow way I scrub the dishes and wring out the sponge, or in the heavy way my wife offers me a cup of bitter green tea that has steeped too long.

I think we both partially enjoy the sadness and the inability to say much. I can’t say chipper banter does the same for me on these autumn nights.

Last night we had drinks with some friends. The level of laughter and joy was in direct proportion to the peculiar shadow of unspoken sorrow that hung in the air. Maybe it was just me. I didn’t ask. Instead, I laughed with tears in my eyes. They probably thought I was happy.

When we got back to our apartment, I put on an oboe adagio by Albinoni, followed by some fado. We both sat quietly listening to the music.

There is something true about sadness. It brings me closer to something I can’t put my finger on. Something uncanny.

One day, if we stay together until the end, one of us will bury the other person. just to add to the bewilderment and bitter mystery of things. The other will follow suit, to who knows where. Maybe into the bardo. Maybe into another variation of the same beautiful, but baffling, life of suffering.

I don’t have any answers.

In the meantime, we will let autumn do its thing, and follow its deep downward trajectory into winter.

© Carlo Zeno 2023

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Thank you for reading, and thank you to Ravyne Hawke for the compelling prompt/challenge/competition. The prompt was as follows:

“Write an essay based on the concepts of renewal and/or rejuvenation — for Spring and harvest and/or consequence — for Autumn, and whatever those words mean to you.”

Here is a recent poem I wrote below. Thanks again 🙏

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