C'est l'automne maintenant.

"Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall." -F. Scott Fitzgerald

When I woke up this morning, the sky still reflected the grey of last night's storm, and I put the chill wind I felt down to the rain as well. I spent nearly six hours in a run-down IUPUI School of Nursing classroom lit by fluorescent lights, with windows of sunlight behind me that I never saw.

And when I stepped outside, already high from the liberation of knowing one more step to college was completed, I was blinded for a moment by actual sunlight. Not the filtered crap that comes through the  meurtrières that pass as windows in my school or the horrible yellow rays that reflect off the buses around my high school parking lot, but real sunlight. I'd forgotten the impact real sunlight has on the colors of the world. This strange, in-between season has brought the rain the summer lacked, and the weeks of storms have returned the green to the world. The trees looked as if they were stretching, waking up not from the death of winter but instead of summer, their green returning for a few weeks before the world turned to fire again. The grass was freshly wet, the soil beneath especially brown; even the buildings were more vibrant. Suddenly, the stop lights and road signs that had been the only source of color for the summer seemed dull and fake.

The air was still crisp--I don't believe it ever passed 68 degrees today--and I realized that it wasn't the storm making the world cool and beautiful. It was impending autumn. It may only be the beginning of September, but I can already sense October.

I can smell the bonfires, feel the warmth of the heat on my face and the chill of the night air on my neck. I can taste dried maize and pumpkin seeds; I hear the laughter of my friends as we wander through parks, trying to accurately capture the beauty of the world around us and just falling short. I can see the beauty of nature, the way the seasons really affect the world.

I can feel the impending nervousness of college, the rush and struggle to get our final test scores and fill out the right applications and appear the best we possibly can in order to avoid life-long student debt. I can feel the pull of youth, the beginnings of our last-ditch efforts to go outside and explore this world while we're eighteen, to take spontaneous roadtrips to however far away one tank of gas is, the haunting realization that this is our last chance to really screw up and not have it count.

C'est l'automne maintenant. And for once, l'automne may be winning my affections over le printemps.