It’s 85 degrees outside and the leaves are falling off the trees. Some have turned yellow or brown, and they gently glide down to the freshly-cut grass. I’m still scratching mosquito bites; this doesn’t make any sense. 

I took another trip around the sun in a place where the sun is stronger and should be shining more frequently, but it seems like it rains just as much as in England instead. The humidity is heavier here as well, and I find it hard to breathe sometimes. It’s not COVID, it’s the moisture in the air, that’s what I tell myself, not to convince, only to better understand. Repeating a sentence, a thought, or an idea over an over to oneself is not necessarily a delusion or a distraction or even a method to wish away the truth. Sometimes the mind simply does not want to accept what is really there until it is encouraged, like a small child. 

We all want to feel safe and secure. A key marker of adulthood is knowing that you can take care of yourself, yet also understanding the abundance of love that is already there and it doesn’t mean you are any less of a human to accept and ask of it. 

Out of nowhere, it’s starting to rain. If you look out one window, there’s a downpour, and out of another, the air is still. Funny old place, is North Carolina. I look from one window to another and feel a sense of deja vu. It’s like a dream I didn’t quite capture, or I may have forgotten, or a memory that’s lost. It’s even a bit like another place and time that I looked into without knowing it, where another existence runs on and on. Where it’s raining out of one window and not the other, and I know that I am not quite myself. 

Both music and memories can be echoes of the past or another life, or one running in tandem in a parallel universe. What you do with these whispers and rain and curious seasonal conundrums is up to you. I choose to live them.