“Nature’s first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower, but only so an hour.”
I never liked that poem by Robert Frost. It’s too pretty. It’s too glamorous. It’s too formulaic. It’s too banal. It’s too simplified. It’s too black-and-white (or too green-and-gold—rather). Everything that he says I always knew biblically. It wasn’t until I knew it personally that I started to take issue with that poem.
There’s green and gold and black and white, but in reality it’s all gray.
“Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief.”
I can assure you that if Frost suffered from a mood disorder, no poem he wrote about changing seasons would have rhymed and sounded like it came straight out of a nursery rhyme. I’d rather turn to Solomon than to Robert Frost and read Ecclesiastes, and I’m not even religious, but I think he made some better points than Frost and took a nuanced approach about the fleeting nature of things. Good days are a gift. Nothing can be known or predicted.
“So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.”
It’s not as simple as being able to predict dawn going down to day. It’s unpredictable. Sometimes it’s dawn going down straight to dusk or midnight or dawn staying there for longer than expected. Sometimes dawn was never even gold to begin with.
I can still recall the feeling of my monogrammed comforter from Pottery Barn nestled over every inch of my body in 8th grade. I can recall the sight of the fairy lights I draped on the walls of my room one Fall when I was growing up—an extra iota of light in an attempt to distract myself from the darkness which pervaded my room earlier and earlier each day. Apple cider and Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur and half-decent notes app poetry to try to numb the pain.
I was undiagnosed then.
The weather’s been getting colder which means I’m struggling to even write this. It should’ve been done a while ago. I might need to ask for an extension—another one, I mean—just like 8th grade. I can still feel the burns I would get on my back from leaning against the space heater in my room for hours on end—The Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Hamlet piling up next to me, chapters upon chapters unread, essays due yesterday and the week before and the week before that too. Stained comforters and unwashed hair. Showers that lasted too long when I finally did take them with the water as hot as it would go. I would turn the shower on as hot as it could go and clench every muscle in my body—just to prove I could do it. The burn was intoxicatingly suffocating and there was something so gratifying about it.
Nearly-absent libido and Winter Candy Apple from Bath And Body Works. The smell of pumpkin but the artificial kind—the kind you would find in a Yankee candle or throughout the shelves of Home Goods when they switch up their stock to Fall-themed goods. Comfort food that’s now uncomfortable.
The other day I switched out my tank tops and t-shirts for sweaters and long-sleeved shirts, yet my hands still reach for the tank tops on the top shelf whenever they get the chance.
I can still hear my mother’s voice in my ear as I’m leaving the house saying “you need to wear a sweater or a light jacket over that. You’re gonna be cold.”
“I’m fine.” I insisted, seconds before stepping outside and holding my breath as my muscles tense and my eyes tear up from the wind. In retrospect, this had nothing to do with oppositional propensities—rather something more internal.
I got on the school bus and listened to the chatter of my peers around me. “I like the fall because I like apple picking and stuff and those little Pillsbury Halloween cookies, but I don’t like the winter because it makes me, like, depressed.” I roll my eyes.
I can feel myself sinking into the leather seat of the bus. I hope no one sits next to me. Right now I feel heavier than the three people combined that are supposed to fill this three-seater—figuratively, I mean.
It’s only October.
Even writing this feels like I’m doing something wrong—boo-hoo…another white girl is sad. My roommate’s family friend got murdered today. Her husband turned the gun on himself after killing her. Their three children found the body. My friend’s brother just went missing. There’s a war going on. Another white girl is sad. Woe is me. I’m feeling some sort of self-pity-induced-guilt for even writing this. It feels like calling your mom from the nurse’s office in middle school and begging her to pick you up when there’s a person bleeding out next to you. It’s making me feel even worse.
And it’s only October.
Sex is only fun in the summer and the spring, and if I have it during the fall or the winter, it’s usually only to fill a void—a coping mechanism to numb the pain—something that I barely even enjoy.
I don’t like “apple picking and stuff and those little Pillsbury Halloween cookies” like those girls on the school bus in 8th grade because they’re only a sign of what’s to come—and actually of what’s already here. If you think about it, apple picking was the original sin. Maybe Frost was onto something with “so Eden sank to grief”.
Have you ever felt lonely in a room full of people? Have you ever felt like if a tree fell in a forest and a hundred other people were around, it still might not make a sound? And if it did make a sound, Mr. Frost, it sure as hell wouldn’t be a rhyming one.
Have you ever been walking through a grocery store, wondering why everything feels so heavy, so you turn around to take things out of your cart and realize there's nothing inside it?
Have you ever resented people solely for being content because it felt unfair? Some days each child playing ball, each passerby who feigns a smile, each bodega worker who takes 4 seconds too long to scan my items feels like they’re earning a spot on my hit list—can I say that?
And it’s only October.
The toddler being loud on the subway next to me right now is getting on my nerves twice as much as usual. Her mom is too for not controlling her. I’m looking around the train car to see if everyone else is as irritated as I am. The man in a suit next to me is reading Kafka without batting an eye. I don’t think he’s actually reading it, but he’s still able to continue performatively reading it without being disturbed to the degree I am. The woman leaning against the pole in front of me continues to stare down at her phone, scrolling through Instagram. Someone’s phone rings at the other end of the train car. I jerk my head out like a chicken to see who it is. I look him directly in the eye until he silences his phone. Nobody else seems to notice. I’m not usually this irritable.
And it’s only October.
I have more tolerance for the beggars on the train than for people like this.
When the beggars on the street or addicts on the train are ranting and being dismissed by the rest, I am often the only one to truly listen to them. I recognize their abandoned genius and treat their L train diatribes as sermons because oftentimes I see myself in them.
They’re not crazy. They’re misunderstood geniuses. Watch Good Will Hunting once and you’ll understand. Sanity is nuanced. What is it I said about a tree falling in a forest with a hundred people around and it still not making a sound?
I repeated a fragment of an L train beggar’s brilliance to my friend once and she replied “even a broken clock strikes right twice a day”. I responded, “No, they’re not broken.”
My eyes are struggling to stay open as I’m writing this. I got nine-and-a-half hours of sleep last night. It’s dark outside now. I might have to resume writing tomorrow. I’m in a near-catatonic state of existential dread and avoidance—my stoicism mistaken for reticence by some, but just two weeks ago I was amidst a state of frenetic hyper-productivity.
And it’s only October.
I wish the Parsons students would stop posting pictures of their spiced lattes and links to their Fall music playlists.
To the person next to me, the air smells like Phoebe Bridgers and Girl in Red and ever-changing foliage and tailgates and flannels and trips Upstate and Spirit Halloween and chai (but not chai tea because I hate when people say that because it’s redundant). To me, it smells like the inside of a psych ward. The air smells like memories of 8-year-olds locked in rooms banging their heads against the wall repeatedly and of 4-oz cups of apple juice with a slightly metallic aftertaste because you had to pull the foil back to drink the juice and of monitored bathroom visits and of grippy socks and of the tiny salt and pepper packets for your steamed vegetables—not of this year but of years before and before that and before that too.
My body is a temple—sure, but only one The Sackler Family prays at.
The people telling me that it gets better are only making things worse. When my extended family members recite phrases that sound like they’re walking down the sympathy card aisle of a store without having any personal experience to add, it’s almost counterintuitive. It makes me want to wallow in my own filth even more—merely to spite them.
And it’s only October.
I’ve had days my fingers left an imprint in my hair when I stroked it because opening the shower curtain was a month’s worth of work, and I’ve had days where I’ve had to check if my feet were still on because I made myself too occupied to sit down even for the length of a TV commercial. My emotional state is but a candle in the wind. I have always lived violently—finding myself either begging my eyelids to close or having to nail them open—confiding in my comforter or not having felt its weight in days. In the winter, my comforter is a faded, stained version of the once-cerulean blue it used to be, but I can assure you it was never gold, Mr. Frost.
My friend asks me if I want to watch Halloween movies. I say no. I don’t like watching Halloween movies and I don’t like watching Christmas movies. Retrospectively, maybe The Grinch was bipolar too. I don’t like holiday music or the sight of the first snow. It’ll just end up in piles on the sidewalk anyway—gray in a day or two. There’s something poetic about it.
Nothing white can stay. It was never gold. None of it was ever gold.
Nature’s first green was never gold. It was only ever green. There was nothing ever poetic about it. Spring is Spring and Summer is Summer and Fall is Fall and Winter is Winter. How’s that, Mr. Frost?
Written by Lucy Geldziler
Photography by Rose Miller
Talent: Zoë Nadeau @zoeenadeauu , Sophie Gilbert @sophieg32
