Cycles

Each season, I become a different creature. In the fall, I am myself as a nine year old child. Starting fifth grade for the first time. Wearing off-brand black and white sneakers and a yellow striped scarf from the outlet mall. I have no fears, no memories of pain; the leaves are crisp and the air is sweet. By the winter, I have grown fur and long teeth and my cravings are for salted broth and the smell of burnt twigs. The rings of the tree i burrow in reflect the amount of times I’ve gone through this cycle. Child to animal to maiden. Spring maiden in strappy sandals, dressed in all my terror for the life ahead. The flowers come up and the air clears and the water shines and the rest of my life opens up like a grand staircase. The last few steps are too far below, fog blurs the threshold to the bottom. I’m so pretty and my skin is smooth and what if I fall? I do—always. Into summer. Where I become the embodiment of the past: all of its characters and music and perennial leaves and yells and drives. Summer absorbs all the other seasons, reflects myself back to me. Every summer, without fail, I am a 17th century farm girl, hidden away in the woods behind my house, furiously scribbling away at my papers, laughing at the chipmunks. Then I get in my car and I’m my sister when she was 17. I am myself as a passenger in the car of a forgotten friend. I am listening to the lyre and the harp and the drums and the bass booming through the sedan’s speakers. Sublime enlightenment. Pressed by the heat of the summer, I become a diamond. A fragile, rainbow thing who visits autumn and is hidden away and falls into the snow in January and gets back up with dirty knees and pansy buds.