seasonal

a short story about S.A.D, high/low pressure systems, and relationships with depression

Audrey is the kind of girl who, as the world tilts and quarterly brings us to the brink of each new season, declares the incoming as her new favorite, replacing the last to have come and gone.

“You know, I really think fall is my favorite season,” she says, the moment hot chili becomes appetizing and the NY Jets have lost their first three games.

“Summer is definitely number one,” she declares at the first trip to the beach, failing to redact this claim even after her vanilla skin gets turned salmon-pink by the sun.

“Winter is the best,” after cupping her hands around a warm mug of hot chocolate, no doubt specially topped with festive marshmallows and loaded with squirts of caramel, nothing less than the optimal approach to the craft of reveling in the season.

This dispensation is either irritatingly inconsistent or charmingly regular, depending on which way you see it, a sort of emotional glass half-full situation. It means she is either fickle in her affections or someone with a perpetually glad disposition, or both, which was how I tended to see it—when I knew her, anyway.

At first I found Audrey to be someone who seemed very happy, always. The thing about people like this: it all seems fine until suddenly you’re not very happy yourself and they are no longer a mirror, but sort of an opacity from which you can retrieve nothing resembling reciprocity.

Me, my mood changes with the seasons. So when we met in spring I was on the upswing, you could never tell I was one half miserable.

“Oh, I love the smell of spring, it’s like dirt and living things and earth!” She said as we walked Albany’s streets late (too late) at night, taking a short cut through Washington Park. I forgave her use of the duplicative descriptors dirt and earth.

“Worm shit, probably,” I said, and made her laugh as she balanced herself walking on a curb like she was a 10-year-old kid.

We had just left a venue called The Fuzzbox, me having been invited there by my Sunday-league soccer teammate, unbeknownst to me that the band he was in played the most blood-curdling of screamo metal, which made for the possibility of a mosh-pit forming like a late-summer hurricane.

Audrey and I found each other when the eye of the mosh pit got spinning and, like others who wanted no part, were pushed to the edges of the vortex and into close quarters. She was there with another teammate’s girlfriend, and I stood with my back to the young men pulling chains and two-stepping, her shoulder pressed between my pecs, a paltry shield against the winds of their limbs.

Something cliched like, “Getting to know each other pretty well here!” was said by me, likewise by her, smiles shared, small talk sporadically exchanged with loud voices over my teammate’s shredding guitar solos. The group was going out to drinks that night and invited me along.

She had on a red lip and a seasonally appropriate matching red leather jacket that night, her hair frizzed and curled enough to engage but barely not enough to make you think she’d been electrocuted. There was a tattoo on her wrist which, she explained, was some Nordic symbol for music, the first known written word for it. Having drinks with her was easy, all we needed was to stand by the juke box and discuss what was there, what was playing, our tastes overlapping beyond the death-metal we’d just experienced. I was tricked into believing things could be easy.

We were walking from the bar to the Ben & Jerry’s down the road, a venture of her suggestion.

“Isn’t it too cold, maybe, still, for ice cream?” I asked, shivering in the early spring night.

“No, never! Never too cold for ice cream, silly,” she said, putting her finger on my nose in what was (undoubtedly) a drunken fashion.

I brought to mind the mosh pit and thought, maybe I should have been braver and taken part. Maybe it’d feel nice to get hurt and have it be no one’s fault, a consequence of a culture, a side-effect of sadism more intentional and more to-the-point than to be hurt by a girl like this.

‘Talking’ is what they—and we—called it, and still call it, I suppose, when you’re having sex with someone but in that limbo before boyfriend-girlfriend or whatever. I’ve always thought it was a strange word used to encompass far too much; something like, ‘un-platonic exploratory sex-having’ would probably be better.

And sex we did have, as often as possible in what time we could meet between my awkward work schedule and her pursuit of a PHD, which wasn’t often enough to rush the process.

Her hair became even more bouncy with the heat and humidity of the coming months and my mood escalated in tandem, as it always does with higher skies. My performance as a partner improved accordingly, in ways innumerable. We discovered, by way of ample communication, that if I held her legs over my shoulders at a certain angle on the futon, she could orgasm during our intercourse. And I came to each of our dates armed with new music I’d discovered, contrarian theories on popular films, and the wicked ability to smile at whim, all of which delighted her.

In early August we lay on my futon covered in the dew of our sex as a fan in my bedroom window did its best to cool us with air from outside, perhaps only a spare degree cooler than the air in my third floor studio apartment.

“So we should talk about something,” she began, and I fortified myself. ‘Talking’ often ended with talking.

One thing I was sure of: I liked Audrey and wanted to be her boyfriend. But in my experience to that point, I never had to make an effort to start the ‘what are we?’ conversation; it was always started by the woman, almost always too soon. With Audrey it couldn’t come soon enough, yet it didn’t, and I was stuck in an awful rut as to what to do about it and hoped this was the end of such stasis.

“I really like you,” she said. “But here’s the thing: I’m going to Ecuador in a couple weeks.”

“Ecuador,” I said, the verbal equivalent of a blink.

“Yes, with my friend Eleanor, to teach English for six weeks. It’s part of like a volunteer thing through a program with my school. I’ve been planning on it for like six months now I think?”

“Ecuador with Eleanor,” I said, tasting the rhyme, bruised by the unexpected nature of the conversation. We lay apart, on our backs, feeling the feeble ceiling fan try and keep up with its window-borne brethren. It was too hot to be near each other.

“Yes, and six weeks is a long time, and I don’t know how serious we are but I didn’t want to, I don’t know, make you commit yourself to me, or me to you, what with me going away for so long. And I figured, well, maybe if we can make it through that, me going to Ecuador, then when I come back we can really be something?”

“Sure,” I said. “That seems fair to me.” It didn’t, or at least I wasn’t sure, but also I figured it was the end of us, although I was wrong (only slightly). She kissed me on the cheek then flopped back over to her side.

“Jesus,” she said, “Why don’t you get some air conditioning?”

I have this theory about my condition. It has to do with barometric pressure. And small sinus cavities. And small ear canals. And capillaries in the skull.

These latter anatomical features I have inherited from my father, and the former comes about in the atmosphere of my home, the continually wishy-washy upstate New York weather, where there are four seasons, if not in a day, then certainly sometimes within a week—the pressure, therefore, always shifting wildly.

Such shifts in pressure, I surmise, narrow my already constricted orifices and the mind follows the body in that such constriction upon my corporeal being translates into a tightening (in the most cliched sense) of the soul, and what is mood if not a tidal reflection of the soul? My mood then is a bad one.

When the high pressure returns, it’s like a fishing hook’s been caught to the skin on top of my head and someone is reeling me up through a mist of clouds that, upon inhalation, reopen the pathways of my skull for a new, better mood to move in, and to render me somewhat normal again.

(I’m aware this theory is scientifically questionable, but I’m an advocate of intuition in science.)

So when Audrey went to Ecuador, a place of few seasons, I was bitter to be left behind as fall winds flew my mood into flux. We called only once, her first day there, but it was penetrated by the awkwardness of the small room she shared with her friend. We texted often at first, but it lessened to a patter because she was spending time in a different country and experiencing life fully. She was obviously forgiven.

We hung out again straightaway. She came by my place the day after her return but I had forgotten we made plans; or at least, I forgot once I woke up tired after a night of staring into a computer screen, then unceremoniously fell back to sleep again and again until she entered my unlocked apartment and found me snoozing on the futon.

“Are you okay?” She asked, her gentle voice in my ear upon waking me. I got up and answered her by explaining my aforementioned condition in a much more succinct and less clumsy metaphorical fashion as we made our way to the apple orchard, site of so many autumnal dates of our region.

“You don’t seem like yourself, that’s for sure. Why don’t you just move someplace that has better weather?” She followed up as we filled tote bags with apples we’d never eat.

All my memories of apple-picking involve being cold, very cold, tips of your ears and nose feeling the sort of cold that turns to a paradoxical burning.

“I don’t trust it,” I told her.

“Don’t trust what?”

“Being happy all the time. How can you live someplace where things are good like that? It’s dishonest. The world is sometimes shitty, sometimes good. Life is sometimes shitty, sometimes good. If I move someplace where it’s nice all the time, it feels like living a lie. I’ll forget, kind of, that sometimes things are bad, and that’s not good, is it?”

She inspected an apple and wiped it on her shirt as I said this, and I realize now she was wondering if I thought her to be dishonest, her perpetually pleased mood a front or misdirection.

It was no surprise our communication slowed over the course of the coming weeks. Excuses were made, plans re-arranged. She was looking for a job, her first after so much schooling. When she found one, it was in Colorado.

We saw each other one last time before she left. There was a deep mid-November snow (only a couple of weeks after some 60 degree sunny weather, of course) and she suggested we go snowshoeing.

“Now see, when you do these, like, seasonal activities you know, unique to the season, get exercise like this, don’t you feel good?” She asked, between the crunching of our boots. “So this way you experience the benefits of all four seasons instead of them making you miserable when they change?”

It was beautiful, I had to admit: the canvas of white spread before us, sparkling in the sun. It was a high pressure day, but the shrinking effects of coldness on their own are hard to overcome. Her nostrils glowed red with refracted light and she’d have a sunburn by the time we got back to the car.

“Would you ever move?” She asked.

“Move where?”

“Colorado.”

“No, never. The altitude alone lowers the pressure significantly. I don’t think I’d ever make it.”

When we got back to my apartment was when I realized Audrey is the sort of person who makes love like a bad romance writer.

When I saw Audrey again it was early summer, at the farmers market. My half of gladness was flipped facing up, the arterials and crevices of my body opened by heat and humidity to let as much of life in as possible.

I sidled up to her after inspecting some tomatoes at a produce stand. She was running her fingers over a carton of pears, testing their ripeness.

“You know, those aren’t in season yet,” I said. “Not till later in the summer, anyway.”

She exclaimed my name and gave me a hug, however she smelled reminding me only of early spring. “You look great,” was exchanged, and it was true for both of us, probably, in that instance. We gave each other updates on the status of our lives, and I managed to make mine seem hopeful since I was in such a good headspace.

Then she told me:

“I met a guy out there. He’s really great. We’re moving to SoCal in a couple months to be closer to his family. I already got another job and everything.”

The thing about Audrey is—most of all—she enjoys change, motion and its perpetuity. Or at least, that’s how she was when I knew her.