early autumn as a laundry list
of standout moments:
It is the Mid-Autumn festival and mooncakes will be sold out online, everywhere, but on a Tuesday afternoon someone you love will find the last half-dozen of mooncakes “on the internet” (you’d never be told exactly where) and this is how he surprises you with them — six small golden rounds of pastry dough, buttons on a plate. You chew, tasting salted egg custard, buttered pastry flakes, and the sureness of something that feels very much like contentment.
You two will go to an early dinner in central London, and, after eating your way through a spread of ox cheek ragu, cauliflower mac n’ cheese, braised duck gnocchi and, lord — lychee crème for dessert — you end up falling asleep during the ride home. That same someone you love will take a photo of you in the car, the moonlight carving a pale crescent across your left cheek. You were out almost immediately, he laughs, and you smile, but really you are only noticing the bottom corner of the picture, the easy lacing of your fingers with his, two hands nestled against each other for the entire duration of the ride. How lucky it is to have, and to hold.
A friend you miss will arrive from New York with six fresh bagels as a surprise, a celebration of poppyseeds, onion granules, and garlic powder exploding in a Ziploc bag. You open it, inhaling the heady scent of dough, and in that moment you will miss Brooklyn just a little bit less. For the next three nights you find yourself already dreaming of breakfast, your heart singing.
October keeps shedding its leaves. One Saturday morning when the clouds look their usual gray but not heavy — you will go to Camden for the first time and delight in coming across a café hidden behind a lofted warehouse full of plants. You try not to buy any more plants, and instead settle for a most over-the-top hot chocolate drink (12oz of Valrhona with a torched marshmallow top) at the market.
You start submitting your writing, for real. It feels terrifying, but you will keep at it.
You get your first rejection and celebrate it as a milestone.
Around the same time, you will also get accepted to a craft workshop on language activism in poetry, where you will be the only person dialing in from outside of America. You mention you miss bagels, cheap LES eats, the 24/7 cacophony of New York traffic — and everyone laughs. This is how you find joy: in a tiny literary community spanning nine people, five cities, and two continents.
Halfway through the month your flatmate will announce that she’s moving back/ home to Austin — which kickstarts a two-week frenzy of hunting for replacement flatmates, packing, and coordinating moving logistics. How many times can you hear the rip of a packing tape roll without flinching? You’ve always been a good packer. See — the secret to that is moving often, and almost always alone. To be honest, you wish you were a terrible packer instead.
You get your second rejection. Your third comes with a note from the editors, and you tuck it into an email folder, still resolute in hope — however small. Each new submission feels as terrifying as the last, but again, you will keep at it.
Then completely unexpectedly, to your greatest surprise — you get your first acceptance (!): an email you open at 1am late Saturday night after gorging on three consecutive episodes of the West Wing. Immediately there is a well of warmth rushing up your throat. You swallow, hard, trying not to spill the growing wet behind your eyes.
You try a new restaurant — this time in Belgravia — with that same someone you love, and fall asleep again during the car ride home, super stuffed, super happy.
The second acceptance (??!?!!!) lands in your inbox and this time it’s from a dream magazine, a literary journal that you’ve stalked since your college years. The email finds you between work calls on a Monday afternoon when London is absolutely pouring and everything is just the same shade of gray outside, and you feel very lucky, also very nervous, thinking this must be some sort of mistake.
But this is what I promise you: that somewhere out there, beyond London’s second lockdown orders and this incessant, unrelenting autumn rain — the rest of your life is aching to blossom. Trust in the waiting.
