Brumar

I read somewhere the luteal phase in a woman's cycle is a period of grief.

A sort of autumn of the womb. A period of grace for your body to make its peace with what will never be. A banshee of potentiality.

We are adrift, always, on a sea of different selves we might have been. But we do not stand always at a crossroads. This is a very specific time, immediately after the choice is made. It's the only window of time when you are still close enough to the crossroads to glimpse the other path.

It is a period of intense longing. A time for dying. As is fall.

'Brumar' is a popular name for November in my country. Popular, yet archaic. It doesn't surface in ordinary conversation much. It is literally the month of hoar frost. A preparation for inevitable winter.

It has always been a point of fascination for me, the way death feels so similar to life inside my body. The eerie similarities to new life, when it's really only just the winter of another road you'll never take. I liken it to the way nature often seems to mimic a second spring, during the second half of fall. Perhaps only in some places. Here, certainly.

Where, just for a day or two, you think maybe there'll be life here yet.

But there's only ever dead flowers, at the end of the day.

This is goodbye to fall. My own, as well as the one that has surrounded us. I don't come here often. But this is my entry for the #monomad challenge.