In which I get sad about the weather no matter what it is

It was only by chance that I left my house twice this morning. I’d forgotten my wallet. So, for the second time this morning, I strode out the door, just in time to watch a gust of wind spread a thin sheet of rain so fine it was hardly more than a field of mist with somewhere else to be. For all of the soft lightness one could mean by invoking the image of being “on a cloud” or even “in the clouds,” I think that, if the breeze had dislodged one and brought it right down to us, it would be much more like this: dark and unrecognizable from here within its fluid bounds. Instantly familiar, though, was the gentle spattering that coats any exposed bit of skin or hair. This feeling never seems more than a day or so away this time of year, I guess with the exception of this year in particular. My long and often dreaded fall into the winter has been clearer than ever I remember it; I doubt the NPR conversation about the health impacts of our changing world paid any mind to the potential for a sharp reduction in the seasonal mental plague that seems to sweep this corner of the country each year. For some of us, perhaps that plague never comes, but for those who know it, perhaps that reprieve wouldn’t come either with the clear days instead acting as a reminder of the darker wave of change beneath this blue and white crest of sunshine and light clouds.

I only went outside for a few minutes out of today, but I felt truly better for it. The transcendence of being enmeshed in nature, even within the suburbs of an already small city, is one of the most easily accessible forms of reprieve from the self I’ve encountered so far. At least, it’s the easiest that doesn’t require a full day’s commitment and come with stomachable but potentially unimaginable risk to my mental health. Setting today’s in particular to Fitzpleasure felt especially perfect: the world, too, felt like punchy yet playful harmonies dancing overtop of something much heavier, grinding, unrelenting. To lose oneself into the world around, and to feel the loss of the world around oneself into art; for me, these have turned out to be exactly the type of easily accessible transcendence that can be lost with too great of exposure to these same things in the wrong way or with the wrong attention. However we kill the version of ourself that knows this place too well, knows this song already, and however we renew ourselves to look at these things again, again, each time as the first, these are the ways that we truly recognize these things, not because we have seen them before but because we are seeing them now. However we are convinced that we know, that we’ve been, that we’ve heard, these are the ways in which we crystallize and die, in disconnection from what’s continually emerging with us, before our very ears and eyes.