An Autumn Sonata

No words or pictures can truly describe the beauty and melancholy of an English autumn. One could only experience it unfolding day by day before one's own eyes; each day like a mosaic from a painting more beautiful than the one before, each day like the last cacophonic burst of a musical splendour before the approaching doom. The sharp chill in the air, the mythic temporal harmony rising from somewhere deep inside, the chirping of birds, the silent prayer to let time stop – that’s how the contemplation of autumn appears to me.

The change of season also reminds me, strangely enough, of another city thousands of miles south: a city which I had known and loved so intimately, which had been my homeland, and makes me feel at exile anywhere else in the world. Normally around this time of the year, winter slowly starts descending on the smog-filled rickety streets of that city, which had now been left behind by an entire generation. What had once been beautiful is now only a helpless haunting memory; like life itself, an endless elegiac yearning.

Ithaca, as always continues to remain elusive, hiding behind the perennial mist, forever beyond understanding…

October 26, 2009

The Last Scene of Act I

With each passing day, the melancholy of the autumnal air is becoming thicker and thicker. Every morning, as I leave for my office, I tend to take the longer route through a nearby park; walking along the mounting piles of dead leaves which seem to cover the morning earth with almost a maternal love, like a thick shroud. Sometimes, in the afternoon, as I sit at a café with a cup of Americano (most often the cheapest option), I look at the distant trees lining the Broadway; the gentle rustle bringing-in the subtle but inevitable fragrance of decay. And I go back to watch the movies, read the books, and live through the weekdays and the weekends, sometimes taking pictures of the fallen leaves as I pass by, marking my days in the calendar. During the long evenings, I often fail to remember if it’s my first autumn, or have I died here before. I fail to remember many things as I sip my wine and think about the increase in heating bills with the approaching winter (all the while looking at the TV screen where the Bergman or the Truffaut DVD would continue guiltily). I think of all the people I had known in the past, people with whom I had once shared a passionate drink or an evening of naïve argument; who are now no more than strangers, living many milky-ways away. I think of the many imaginary lives I’ve lived, the many wishful thoughts of adolescence, the many self-ridiculed dreams of youth. I think of the years I’ve spent running – from place to place, from room to room, from books to books, from lives to lives, each time a disappointment, each time a bigger failure than the once before. And now as I once again sit at my café and sip my Americano gone cold, the movies and the books and the rooms seem to fade out. All I can see in front of me is the approaching autumn; the piles of fallen, abandoned leaves.

With my last fading strength, I wish I could ask like a child: what had life been like?