content warning: gun violence, homophobia, hopelessness
The trees are already bare.
I’m not sure what it’s like around your parts, but here in Philadelphia, the leaves usually hang on until early December. It’s strange to see winter peek her snowy head around the corner so soon; the view outside my window could just as easily be January as November.
The colors were riotous this year, though. We’ve gone a number of autumns in washed-out browns, perhaps a daring red or defiant orange here and there. This autumn was, by far, the most colorful leaves our region has seen in some time. I tried to savor it, I promise. I took photos half-hanging out of a car window and stopped in the middle of sidewalks more than once to gaze at the glory of an oak dressed in golds and scarlets.
The colors were short, as all sweet things are. Autumn was a blissful daydream sandwiched between a too-hot summer and a long Pennsylvanian winter. It felt like the honeymoon period of a new relationship or the first time it’s cool enough to wear your favorite sweater or the sacred moments that exist between breaking news alerts of another mass shooting.
Like Philadelphia, America enjoys only a few moments of color, trapped as we are within this constant haze of gunsmoke. The billboards and the Instagram accounts would have you believe that being queer here is a dream—all rainbow-flagged glee and drag queen brunches and endless pride parades.
It’s better here than it is in other places, and I am not ignorant of that privilege, nor the privilege afforded to me by my straight-passing relationship. But even I know that being queer here is like autumn—there are pieces of time where you can don your scarlets and your golds and exist freely, but those moments are inexplicably bookended by the hot heat of hatred and the cold chill of violence.
Autumns are short, so the very system with its boot on our neck is the same system that tries to extend the season—they drape themselves in faux leaves and ask if we’d like to buy some, too. Don’t we want to show our pride? Don’t we want to shop at the place that stickers plastic orange leaves to its windows? Don’t we want to perform for everyone else? Wouldn’t that show them that we’re not so frightening, if we could dance and entertain them? Wouldn’t it be better if we spent autumn harvesting our scarlets and our golds, drying and flattening the leaves and painting them green and trimming off their sharp, curving edges until they fold softly and fit neatly inside a wallet?
I do not know how to fix this. I do not know how to keep us safe. I do not know how to exist like this, constantly picking through the rubble.
There are so few things I know for sure, but here is one: hold tightly to your autumns. Like all sweet and sacred things, they are short. The trees—I am so sorry to tell you this—will be bare before you know it.
until the next dark moon,
Victoria
PS - i still haven’t decided whether it was right to send this newsletter. but i wrote it, and i didn’t change my mind for three days. so here it is.