There is always a point in September when fall stops feeling so distant. For a few weeks, everyone insists it is autumn while still dressing for July, and then one morning the air finally changes. But not dramatically. It is usually something minute: the walk to class feels a bit colder than expected, somebody has switched from drinking iced coffee to hot, and the trees have started to change colors. You leave your room without a jacket and regret it immediately. By the afternoon, though, the sun is out again, and you are carrying that same jacket under your arm, furious that the weather has made you look indecisive.
This is probably my favorite time of year to get dressed. Not because fall fashion is especially original––it is mostly the annual rediscovery of knit sweaters, trench coats, and the revolutionary concept of layering––but because it feels like the brief moment when getting dressed can be both practical and slightly delusional. Summer is too hot to negotiate with. Winter eventually humiliates you into wearing whatever keeps you alive. But fall gives you options.
Something about autumn makes even ordinary life feel more memorable while it is happening. Maybe it is the light or the temperature. Maybe it is the fact that everything looks slightly better when red and orange leaves are on the trees. But I think part of it is that fall arrives already carrying a sense of its own ending.
The leaves become beautiful at exactly the moment they are about to fall. The days start shrinking just when the weather finally becomes pleasant. You get maybe three weeks of perfect jackets before the temperature becomes personally insulting. Autumn is almost offensively temporary.
And I think we know that while we are living it.
Usually, nostalgia is supposed to come later. You live through something, enough time passes, and then one day a song plays, or you smell a familiar scent or find an old picture, and suddenly your chest does that annoying little thing. You miss it.
That makes sense. Something is gone, so you miss it.
What makes less sense is how often we seem nostalgic for things that are not even over yet.
There are times when I am sitting with people I love and suddenly think, with no invitation whatsoever, I am really going to miss this. Nothing is wrong. Nobody is leaving. And yet, some part of my brain has already stepped outside of the present and started looking back at it. The moment splits in two.
There is the version of me who is actually there—laughing, talking, sitting in someone’s common room at an unreasonable hour—and then there is another version of me somewhere in the future, remembering it. For a few seconds, I can almost see the memory being made while I am still standing inside it.
It is quite irritating, honestly. Can I fucking finish having the experience before I start mourning it?
I used to think nostalgia required distance. That something has to be firmly over before you could really long for it. But I am starting to think that sometimes the opposite is true. Sometimes simply knowing that something will end is enough.
Maybe this is just what happens when you become too aware of time: we start to create this kind of premature nostalgia. The moment becomes more valuable the second we recognize that it is temporary.
There are experiences that seem to announce their impermanence while they are happening. The last few weeks of summer. The end of a school year. A friend visiting from another city. Even a really good night out can start to feel sad around 1 am, not because anything bad has happened, but because you know eventually the party will get shut down.
The awareness of an ending changes the experience before the ending actually happens. Then, suddenly, you start paying more attention.
You notice the song playing in the background, or what you are wearing. You notice the way the room looks, or exactly how it smells. You take a picture you probably would not have taken two hours later. It is as if the possibility of losing something teaches you how to see it.
And that sounds so beautiful, until you realize how exhausting it can be. Because once you become too conscious of the fact that a moment will eventually become a memory, it becomes surprisingly difficult to just have the moment.
You know that the people around you will change. You know you will change. You know there are rooms you spend every day in right now that you will eventually never enter again. There are routines that feel boring today that will one day become specific markers of who you used to be.
And there is absolutely nothing you can do about that.
I think college makes this feeling especially difficult to avoid because everyone keeps reminding you that it ends. People are constantly telling you to enjoy it: these are some of the best years of your life. You will miss it when it is gone. Which is a strange thing to hear about your life while you are still living it. You eventually start to wonder whether you are enjoying everything enough.
But we cannot experience our lives entirely from the perspective of the people we will become. Because there is something a little tragic about being so afraid of losing a moment that you leave it before it is actually gone.
Maybe nostalgia does not have to be something we eliminate. Maybe noticing that a moment will end is part of what makes it beautiful in the first place.
The goal is not to stop feeling nostalgic for things before they are gone. Maybe it is just to keep that nostalgia from pulling us out of them.
I am not particularly good at this. Sometimes, when I catch myself mentally stepping outside of a moment, I have to remind myself that I do not need to understand it yet. I do not need to decide whether this is one of those moments I will talk about years from now, or what it will mean to me once it is over. I can just let it happen.
I think that is the closest I have come to living in the moment. When I’m not forcing myself to be perfectly present, but resisting the urge to turn everything into a story before it is even finished. Some things are allowed to be ordinary while they are still happening. There will be plenty of time later to romanticize them, to give them meaning, to miss them. Fall will end, the leaves will disappear. The weather will become unbearable, the jacket that felt perfect for October will eventually be buried underneath something much less attractive and much warmer.
I know that. I think we all do.
I know that there will probably be some cold ass day in February when I would give anything for this exact weather again.
But February is not here yet. The leaves are still on the trees, and I would rather be here while they are.
