Fall-ing
So, I accidentally wrote a drabble when I wasn't paying attention. I apologise to all you autumn lovers out there, it's not my thing and it's inescapable! Anyway I wrote this at lunchtime to get it out of my system! I thought it might distract from...well...you know.
She was running late for her nine thirty lecture. There wasn’t time to wait in line behind the flurry of girls ordering their pumpkin spice lattes so she’d have to forgo her iced tea today. She scoffed quietly at all those fall aesthetic girls, wearing knitted scarves and gloves even though the weather was still perfectly temperate. Every year they took the first tumbling leaf as their cue to light their cinnamon apple scented candles, pull on chunky knits and start squealing about things being ‘cosy.’ It was decidedly not her vibe.
“Oh screw you,” Betty muttered under her breath as a girl with amber curls escaping her rust coloured beret threw an armful of leaves in the air, staring at them as they fell, with a degree of enchanted wonderment that suggested that gravity was an unfamiliar concept to her. As Betty strode by, the girl yelled, “God, way to ruin the shot. Thanks a lot,” and Betty realised that her boyfriend had been capturing the moment on a phone as she had walked between them. The pink case suggested it was her phone so Betty sang a few bars of “White Woman’s Instagram” and kept right on walking. She heard the girl’s yelp of protest behind her followed by the boyfriend’s rumbling laughter.
She threw herself into a seat at the back of the lecture hall and took out her laptop. The image that appeared when she fired it up was a beach scene, turquoise water, palm trees, in the foreground a fuchsia coloured cocktail with a paper umbrella. She gazed at it and wished she could transport herself through the screen to that eternal summer. She hated the sense of time slipping through her fingers that came every fall, change and decay, wet leaves rotting in stinking piles, rain, every day a little shorter than the one before, every night a little longer, endings and fog and the steamed windows of overheated rooms.
Someone dropped into the seat next to her. She removed her arm from the rest and checked that she wasn’t taking up too much space. Soon there was another laptop next to hers, on the screen she glimpsed a snow scene, pine forests and white capped mountains. She was aware of his leather jacket creaking as he fidgeted, his long legs sticking out into the aisle. She risked a glance at him and blushed when she realised it was the boyfriend. She’d been pretty rude. She steeled herself and made her apology.
“Hey, sorry about before. I think I got out of bed the wrong side. Not a big fan of the season. Could you apologise to your girlfriend for me?” she said, shooting for contrite but not feeling that she quite nailed it.
“Oh, not my girlfriend, just a friend.” He smiled at her and glanced at her screen. “What was it Henry James said? Summer afternoon - the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
“I thought that was cellar door, “ she smiled.
“Hey, if anyone’s going to be quoting Donnie Darko here it ought to be me not you, my sweet summer child,” he laughed. Hot and funny, he was exactly her aesthetic.
“Well I guess you’re happy since winter is clearly coming,” she replied smartly with a wave at his snowy screen, glancing over at him to see if her matching GOT reference had landed. She found herself tumbling into fathomless eyes from which she was powerless to look away, blue green like a summer ocean. The world seemed to retreat as he moved towards her, his eyes flicking down to her lips, but then the lecture hall door slammed and the professor dumped his bag and papers on the front desk with a crash. She dragged her attention to her keyboard even though she could barely process anything that was being said, ignoring the long sigh from the next seat.
The prof was clearly keen to outdo all the pumpkin patch girls. In his russet coloured sweater and his burnt umber corduroy pants he looked like a gingerbread man. “So everyone, welcome to the romantic poets. On this gorgeous late September morning I thought we should begin with Keats, specifically with the Ode to Autumn.”
“Oh for Chrissakes,” she muttered. There was a snort of barely stifled laughter from the next seat.
Somehow she got through the lecture with its oozing cyder presses and rosy hued stubble-plains. Finally at the end of the hour, she prepared herself to leave, with some relief.
“Good note. You don’t want to forget that,” a deep voice murmured beside her and she looked at her screen in confusion.
“Keats, poet, pumpkin spiced bullshit,” was all she had written.
He grinned. “Look I know it’s not really our thing but do you wanna go crunch through some leaves and collect pinecones? See if we’re missing out on anything?”
Somehow, when he put it like that, it actually sounded like a lot of fun. She nodded and found that she had a smile on her face as wide as a jack o’ lantern.
