Fall

Fall is a gorgeous and a foreboding time of year.

I am looking out my window at multi-colored leaves on the ground, the long dead and the recently dead. The wind is blowing as sunshine filters through branches creating patches of brilliance, leaving spots of shade and areas of darkness.

That is what fall is all about.  Contradiction. The beauty of foliage and invigorating crispness in the air soon to give way to howling white landscapes and a desperate need for  warmth.

I can’t help but think about my life at this time of year in terms of the contradictions I have created for myself.

I am a respected college professor.  Students enjoy my classes because I promote an atmosphere of open communication and discerning critique. We laugh, we argue, we read, we write, we learn from each other.  I am paid well enough that I have no worries. I am free to taste of and enjoy life.  

And yet I yearn to become a famous, world renowned, sought after and revered author. My brain tortures me with potential. I write everything. I sell nothing.

So I teach.

If my students could sense the intensity of my anger, the power of my frustration, they would avoid my class at all costs. The danger lies just below the surface of a fragile self-control.

Jill is a student and a very talented writer. I hate her for that. I know she will make a living from her writing, a very good living. She takes what I teach her and expands upon it, experiments with it and improves it. She takes my knowledge and makes it better.

She tells me she has completed a book and is testing the waters to see if there is any interest. I have never taken this seriously because she has not once asked for my advice or allowed me to read even one page of her work. The endless enthusiasm of youth.

Sometimes I swear I see condescension in her eyes but then I dismiss it as imagination colored by my  self-loathing as a failed writer. Still, I think she knows she is better than me and that the only way she will end up in a college auditorium is as a guest lecturer promoting her newest book and sharing her sharply original writing techniques.

We have had drinks together and enjoyed intimate and challenging conversation. In class she shows me a hint of cleavage, she dances more than walks and her confidence is as erotic as it is intimidating. I want more from her, have hinted at it but she is too smart for that.

I am looking out my window at fallen branches compressing twisted fallen branches. Tangled intricately and hopelessly together.  The wreckage of many a winter.  I don’t clear, I don’t rake, it is just not my thing. So the debris piles up, shifts and changes shape and decays in front of my eyes.

I had promise. I still do. But I don’t have the stomach for the rejection, the ass kissing, the contacts that have to be made and the humility implicit in trying to sell bits and pieces of my soul. I went at it like the literary lion I pictured myself to be when I was young. Submitting to magazines and websites, going on literary retreats, reading every book ever written about writing (how ironic is that?), contacting agents, publishers and editors, querying book ideas and following up with submissions that were rejected.

I taught so I could eat. Now I teach and eat shit.

This apartment is small. Not cramped small just smaller than you would expect from a tenured college professor.  I can afford better, much better.  It occurs to me that the closeness functions somehow as  an unconscious admission of my diminishing prospects. Too much space suggests too much potential.  I am floored by this realization.

The phone startles me from this deep reverie and I am edgy and off balance.

Its Jill passionately telling me that she has just sold her first book. My fingers dig into my thigh as I congratulate her through gritted teeth and tell her she is on her way. I suggest we should go out for a drink to celebrate but she says she is already partying with friends.

I am looking out my window during a season where many things begin to die. Beauty thins out every day and suggests something I don’t want to think about.

I will not teach tomorrow. I am not up for it. I think I’ll take a walk and put the note up on the classroom door.