Every year it’s the same. That first hint of damp lingering in the air like thin silvers of smoke. The slight chill that raises a rash of goosebumps. The hard dry turning to plasticine and puddles. That evening ride finishing in the glooming that chivvies me home to the box marked ‘Lights’.
Every year it’s the same. My spirits start the slow annual tumble down into the dark that gets earlier every day. I grieve for the summer I’ve been waiting for, that I always wait for. Every year I feel cheated it always seems that she’s just paused before hurrying on to another place that’s never quite ‘here’. And I think back to bygone days that seemed to stretch on into forever of nights searching for cool spots on hot pillows, peeling skin, tide marks and tanlines, dust stained socks and bikes that can just be let go and left at the end of a ride.
Every year I go barefoot till my toes go blue. Clinging on, pretending till the inevitable miserable digging round for warm layers and the driving inside for lack of light, reluctant getting up to dark mornings. The dank grey smog that creeps in and clings limpet like to the lining of my mind, sending lethargy into my legs and muffled sadness into whatever’s left.
Every year the same. I shuffle through, hating the shortening evenings finding no comfort in a lit fire until at some always undetermined point something: a line of trees ablaze, wall to wall blue sunshine, a sharp breeze in my face, something triggers the warmth that spreads across the wastelands. And suddenly those armwarmers, the second layer of socks, the muddy splatter and the chasing of the light don’t seem quite so much like the end of the world…
Adjustment, it’s a process. It’s been this way since almost always, but every year it feels like the first time, I think it always will.