“The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter-often unconscious but still a faithful interpreter-in the eye.” Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
The car is running softly underneath my right foot, and the brakes clench up under my slightly to vigorous press at the top of the hill. The street is pitch black except for the blue-edged glare of the IHOP sign reflecting across my windshield. The red of the stoplight seems to be more faded than usual and the parking lot of the movie theater is an empty black stretch down the gently, sloped road. Hanging above the muted steel-grey of the stoplight cross-bar is an orange crescent moon.
Warm, low, and shining with left-over sunlight, the moon seems to reach for her left over piece in the Earth. The almost harvest moon, skinny before the flushed glut of the October fullness, pushes an ache in my stomach to the surface. Drawn longing sudden and violent to my fingertips, and for just a moment, I press my hands to the cool of the smudged windshield and think what it would feel like to touch the sharp edge of the moon.
It would feel desperately cold, I think. I mean we know, empirically, that space is cold, and thus with no atmosphere the moon is also cold. The moon, the no name moon, has no heart inside her to bubble up to her surface with tender heat. Has nothing to keep her from the cold clutch of space, inky black and full of faraway stars. I think that’s why she keeps drifting down closer to Earth. Spiraling slowly closer orbit-by-orbit, year by year. She was supposed to be a piece of Earth, supposed to have grass and heat, supposed to be named.
This feeling of namelessness, of desperation to become full and claimed, is what autumn instills inside me at times. A blanket desire for a warm mug of something sweet to be held in empty palms, cupped, curved, and dry around a heat found not within one’s self, to be famished and bursting all at once, to feel chilled and yet warm gently by flame.
A season of disparate dichotomies and shared nostalgic memories, autumn comes bringing winds through the mountain-valley trees. After parking my car, I turned the lights off and settled into the silence of a past midnight neighborhood, the pinging and groaning noises of my old car cooling off my only company. And as I step outside to walk into the little copse of trees guarding the entrance to my stairwell, I can see the orange moon and she can see me and we both smile, a little sadly and part as friends do, softly and with great promise.