Autumn, a noun. One of the hundreds of thousands of words in the English language. To some it means the coming of a season of snow and love. To others its the somber ending of a high-speed, free season. Three full months, mid-September, October, November, through mid- December. Ninety-one days. Each of those days holds a story that can last a lifetime engraved in an individual’s heart, or can be forgotten with frightening speed unintentionally. How easily people forget.

A bouquet of clumsy words run through my head, but gets blown away by the emotionless cold wind of October. Gray skies linger overhead for days and the temperature drops like the brown and orange leaves that blanket the ground. The world seems to slow down, the nights grow longer and the days become shorter.

Words are such interesting things. They are simply inanimate, tiny scribbles on paper and microscopic pixels on an illuminated LED screen. Yet, these seemingly insignificant groups of letters carry weight. They carry weight in memories and recollections of times long past. Fall is one of those words that bear a heavy burden. For me, even the slightest mention of autumn releases a flood of memories good and bad, and a torrential downpour of other words associated with it. Words reiterated and repeated and retold that they are nearly glued to the calendar over the ninth, tenth, and eleventh months. Those words also carry others on their shoulders, continually branching off to others, until I’m consumed in letters and lyrics and sentences, then I fall apart.

Colors. Your mind, of course, associates colors with words. Orange, Brown, Red, and Yellow, warm colors that grow warmer as life grows colder. Colors then swirl and twist into other colors; again, creating a blur in my mind that becomes Fall. It is a time of year that brings more solemn feelings to me; however I find that I miss it when it is gone. I find it quite ironic. Do I enjoy feeling sad? Do I enjoy the bleakness of the sky contrasting with the colorfulness of the ground covered in leaves? Do I like the mild temperatures? Or is there something more? Do I appreciate the memories, good and bad, that shape and mold Autumn for me? I’m not sure, and I doubt I will ever be sure, but Fall is, in fact, my favorite time of year. Of course, this excludes the terrible memories that have fallen in those three or so months.

I lost a very good friend on the 27th of September in 2011. A terrible start to a season of change. That was the second time I had lost a close friend, but the pain was no less incapacitating. Another of my friends got into a serious car accident in October of that same year. Those tragedies along with others in different seasons combined to create long nights for me, long nights spent thinking. I thought, and still do, of a lot of things. Sometimes thinking only makes me sadder, but occasionally, I remember or realize things I hadn’t before.

It took me a long time to comprehend the fact that any change can benefit you, even if its bad. You learn more about yourself and the world than you ever knew before and it can be an amazing thing if you let it. It’s tough to do, I rarely talked about the hardships that I have endured with anybody, but the more I learn how I have changed and become a better person out of those disasters, the more I want to tell my stories to people, because stories are a wonderful thing. They are carried by words and phrases and sentences and paragraphs, but carry morals and truths and adventures and tragedies, much like Autumn does. It itself, is a story to be written and remembered, by you.