Things left in the pocket of a winter coat

I can shapeshift in the fall. I can slip into things and realize that they feel familiar. I can be more restless, but I can also be more patient.

I was quiet in my mom's car, getting my sense of hearing confused with my sense of feeling, exhausting my memory. The last time I heard this album all the way through without stopping, I had a broken heart. I basked in melancholy on my roommate's futon, under piles of blankets in the middle of the day with the blinds closed tight, trying to create the illusion of night for dramatic effect. The feeling of hurting someone else made my skin feel pinched. I was punishing myself. The time before that, I was reclined in the driver's seat of my Toyota Echo on the night of my high school graduation party. Guests had gone, I was alone with the windows up. This album was a graduation present. It was hard to sleep.

Traditionally, this is the time of the year when I want to say the most, but when I feel the least eloquent. Nothing that I write will match the importance of what is happening around me, or inside me.

I'm unpacking sweaters that I didn't know I had. I'm recalling moments that I'd similarly forgotten.

This is the ticket from the theater in the park. The wrought iron table teeters, my right wrist slips across the page of a notebook, the spine creaks when I press too hard. This is the end of the summer and I'm writing this. And I can smell popcorn that doesn't smell like popcorn, but more like a high school football game, or the floor of a movie theater on Lee that we've just trodded into, wrapped in wool scarves and watching our shoulders moisten as the flakes melt under soft yellow lobby light. Now we are at the corner, and we've said goodbye too early and isn't it strange now that we must continue this way. This is you and me drinking coffee from clear cups, being diplomatic about the last bite of cheesecake, which has fallen over onto its side in surrender, and I'm realizing that you are leaving. Now I understand why you came, and why you stood for so long under the hot lights of the stage. Not because of the cold, but because you weren't sure. And at the time, neither was I. I kept a few things. When I get my phonograph fixed, I'll think of you again, when I play them.

This is me promising that my attentions will not die with a season anymore. I will play the same two-disc set all year long--perhaps more rigorously at times. And I will keep one of my sweaters folded on the top shelf of my closet.