Lucien's Lil Nook

As the temperature drops, the air wafts an aroma of dying fauna, a scent I find peaceful and welcoming. Trees begin shedding their leaves, plants stripped bare, and grass erodes into amber. I believe they are gifting us with their lives, a final rejuvenation for the creatures that have to endure a harsh winter before they lie dormant. It’s a welcome dread. After my childhood and teenage years stuck in school, autumn lifts old memories and emotions to the surface of my mind. I reminisce of a time when life was simple, when the changing of seasons was tied so closely with my education and its structure. But as I walk to my car, leaves crunching beneath the soles of shoes I bought to protect my feet as I cook in a kitchen I didn’t know I’d end up in, I feel no joy, but an overwhelming monotony, sour and decrepit.

In the Earth’s dying moments, I found new life. Autumn meant a chance to see my friends from school again, a chance to try better this year, to put more effort into my life and escape the horrors that lived within my home. In death comes life, and the changing of seasons instilled this idea within me, before I even was aware of that metaphors meaning. And when I finally grasped the motivation, harvested the intent I had cultivated for two decades, I graduated.

I was a child of rebellion, feared authority but despised its control. I’d find ways to become independent, to chase a freedom, naive to the weight of responsibility it’d bring. The structure of my life, the foundations I had come to despise for their abusive grip over my life, I now feel as if I took them for granted. Consistency felt suffocating, love and care were shackles that needed discarding, I believed that distancing myself would relieve me of this pain, that the cuts on my heart would stop bleeding and I’d finally be able to heal.

I ran from the parts of life that hurt me, not realizing that those wounds were not caused by those feelings of safety, care, and stability. It’s people that hold the scythes that can harvest or harm. And as I ran, I faulted myself by not having a destination. So I ran into the lives of other people who gave me their love willingly, and in my blindness, I rejected their kindness, fearing the bitterness I believed was inevitable.

My mind constantly thinks, no matter how much I wish it to halt and appreciate the spaces I have found myself in. My body constantly in threatened by imagined demons that chase me to no end. I only think of survival, preserving the best parts of my life as if I loosened my grip, I’d lose it all. I raised myself, thinking of other people supporting me was a sign that I had lost control and ultimately, failed in raising myself. I hold both the parent and the child inside, and realize that I’m growing up.

As I sit in my car, outside the kitchen where I work, dread seeps into the edges of my mind. Is this all my life is worth? When can I start living the life I dreamed of? What is the life I dreamed of? In these moments of anguish, a golden hand reaches out and rubs the back of my head. I don’t call my mother, I don’t dare speak to my father, I never want to burden my sister or add more the plates of my friends or my partner. And the hand is my own, the parent I built inside of myself, providing the comfort I never accepted from anyone else, the care I desperately craved, the unconditional love I thought didn’t exist. And I think maybe, I’m not ready to grow up.

My golden parent isn’t perfect, as I am not perfect. He criticizes me, scolds me, screams at my failures as much as my parents used to do. I can raise myself but at what cost to the child who wished for freedom all those years ago? I’m tired and he’s weary. A child leaving home isn’t only freedom me, but it’s freedom for him, it was freedom for them.

Then maybe he must die.