October complexities
And Embodied Memory
Like many, I suppose, I have always loved fall:
The excited new energy indicating the start of a new school year or semester.
The crisp, the crunch, the cool air.
The first story I ever read as a child to be recognized was about fall and its description of the leaves and the air.
I love the space as one season brinks upon another.
That liminal space, right as it’s turning, makes me feel alive.
And yet— fall is not so simple anymore.
My body knows, it remembers the visceral embodied memories of late fall.
It was strange—the other day I was enjoying a rare moment of fall happiness where it actually felt like fall in Tennessee, an early morning, before the temperatures crept up to 80 degrees again.
I felt happy, that surge of excitement that I described above—
Followed, almost immediately, by a sense of dread, a heaviness and a creeping painful recollection. I didn’t even think about my dad, the death-versary, anything related to him. I wasn’t feeling emotional or moody or sentimental.
Truly, it came out of nowhere.
Memory—especially embodied memory—is so fascinating how it works and emerges.
Even after all this therapy and body-healing work, my body still remembers that the first big T trauma memories are coming—
That this is what it felt like—the air, the season, when I traveled home to my mother after my father blew his brains out. Late October.
My body is trying to protect me, I know that. My nervous system is gearing up, posing, taking its stance, to get ready to once again be shocked, exhausted, traumatized. It feels weary, on guard, to protect myself, but it can’t help it. It doesn’t realize that the threat is gone. It’s separated from my rationality.
It sounds weird as fuck. I agree. It is.
But it’s just how I feel.
It doesn’t seem to get that it doesn’t need to protect me anymore: because now they are all dead.
I wonder how long this will last, if it’ll be my whole life.
Next year will be 10 years since my dad died, so this autumn marks nine years.
I used to love Octobers, often times recalling and quoting the line from Anne of Green Gables author, Lucy Maud Montgomery, “Don’t you just love it that we live in a world with Octobers?”
I do, and yet, also—Octobers are just…much, much more complicated for me now.
