This Gloomy Autumn
The autumn… I am already starting to forget when it began and I have strong doubt that it will ever end.
A park. It is impossible to say definitely whether it is raining or snowing. I am having a walk. The silence is shattered by an explosion, with the sound of every car driving by. There are a lot of people around, but they all look like strangers to me. I am al alone among them. I am getting my mobile phone out of the pocket, dialing the number of my best friend, there is a deafening silence. Beeline refuses again to let me leave this feeling of loneliness behind. Everything and everybody around is grey. There are only displeased faces. And suddenly I am getting disappointed. Such a beauty around! Yes, it is gloomy. Yes, it is wet. But how beautiful! This picture is an open secret. Everyone sees it, but nobody notices. I am walking very slowly, inhaling wet air of autumn, saturated with gloominess. Right beside me a high-heeled girl runs by touching me with her grey scarf, I am hearing a piece of her talk with a mob: “…how disgusting! When will it start snowing at last…” Are you insane? Don’t worry, be happy! Miss Discontent, when there is finally snow under your feet, you will want it to melt. Moreover, now it is not very cold. When winter comes you’ll ask for summer. It is good there where we are far from. It always has been, is and will be that way.
But how wrong it is! We should appreciate what we have. It is so beautiful to walk slowly on wet asphalt in the fog of old park. And even if I am weary as a dog, if I have mountains of work waiting for me, I enjoy these minutes as an opportunity to rest, as time to think everything over. I wish that not only me, but my family, friends, people in the street, the whole city, that planet would feel it.
And I have a strong feeling now that everything is amazing. I could be at another place, in a grey house, in a small apartment, in a stuffy room, having a lot of useless work. Man proposes, God disposes. And I am happy that I have this hour of absolute idleness. I am starting to understand that I understand nothing. I have always hated autumn. And I look around and feel that I am in love with this rain, and I am in love with this fog, and I am in love with these fallen leaves on the ground, and I am in love with this season. Here and now I understand it. And I am completely HAPPY. I understood the world and the world – me.
By Kate Chiryatnikova
Yellow, red, brown, wine – all of these are the colours of that charming and enchanting autumn, which famous writers and poets so often describe in their immortal masterpieces; that autumn, which like a bright image appears in our memory, wakes up nostalgic memories; that autumn, which is with the wedge of birds in the sky, flying away to the south; that autumn, which is with quaint colourfull berets on boy’s and girl’s heads, who hurry somewhere as usual. Golden autumn cries with falling leaves, covering the earth with a rustling, colourful carpet.
Such dark nights, with smiling stars in the sky and wind which blows about my hair – this autumn charms everyone with its breath. All this nights seem to me an excessive generosity of nature.
Opening the window, autumn immediately gets into your house and roams about all the corners together with the slight draught, which makes you stiffen with its cool breath.
The free thought and scientific daring broke their wings because of the inexplicability of such a phenomenon as autumn. And this autumn I like the best. But now everything is different.
Dark. Muddy. One day like the twin looks like another... Practically everyday the sad sky cries with pouring cold rains, like mother cries being mourning for the dead son, who hadn’t returned home from the war.
Autumn. It is time when powerful nature rocking the Earth to sleep with winds and sings lullabies with severe rains. The face of the city became a dark grey mass of people running somewhere.
The trees become naked, suddenly having lost their thick green caftan, which made birds so happy in summer.
Damp. Muddy. The master will never let his dog go outside in such a weather. So, only stray dogs, looking like shabby rats because of the endless drizzling, falling from the sky, whimper running to and fro in the garden.
The first snow melts dirtily having fallen so recently, as sugar in tea. Mud looks like a mash, cars splashing it by wrapping up themselves into warm woolen scarves with their hats awry. From time to time it rains cats and dogs like washing up all the blames of humanity, seldom, the lazy thunder mumble, only half awake.
Pure silence has covered the city. Dead silence...
Day after day the blind night comes down the streets, houses and dashing around out of the window persecuted with the rushes of wind, like a stray dog. The Earth sleeps. This is no lemon light of the moon, no pure twilight, no serene moon, which is in the sky like an innocent child. The wind tears away drops of the rain from roofs, houses and summer-houses like precious stones, making branches of the trees bow low as if it orders them to obey the powerful autumn. The wind, getting into the people’s souls like an impudent guest, makes us remember and think about what we wanted to forget.
You don’t want to dream...
You don’t want to smile...
Nature put on its lacy mourning shawl and bears its hard cross. Why kill the last shred of hope in people’s souls?
In the evening, rickety, grey houses look as if they are trying to give the SOS signals with their small, yellow windows, looking into the night.
And every evening passing by them in the full stuffy train, I ask myself a question: “Does anyone likes this gloomy autumn?” I suppose that such kind of autumn we are able to love only with hatred.
All of this gets us into deep dark depression.
Nature is in its cold ignorance... You want to make an immediate decision to go somewhere far away. Stop. Everyone wants to say stop. But nothing happens...
By Olga Sergeeva
When the last sunny days of September burn down like a handful of weak-willed matches, the nature begins to fade like a flower, a flower whose short life is nearing its end. Little by little autumn penetrates into every living thing, sluggishly as a sermon in a singing voice. When the autumn creeps up, cheerful songs of joy slowly turn into a fatigued dirge without end, a carefree flight of white clouds into senile infirmity of rain clouds, filled with grey melancholy and leaden solitude. The succulent twittering of birds grows silent, then disappears, becomes obliterated by the deafening silence. This absurd silence envelops eardrums in the mist of vacancy, stuffs them up with live soundproof cotton wool, leaving a space only for sickening noise of cars, tranquil mourning of rain, lifeless the shuffling of footsteps on the asphalt and the grave painful breathing of the dying city. Green transforms into yellow and yellow in its turn smolders to ashes and the ashes are blown by the wind and that were the ashes of a summer lost but not yet forgotten.
In a grey morning in early November, looking intently through a blind window, scarcely keeping your eyes open, vainly dying to see at least a tiny spark of the sun, you sense a hard deprivation, as if you were deprived of some significant part of yourself, you feel like losing your sight, seeing no trees but the standing still skeletons painted black and brown, no sky but the black clouds hanging down like scraps of soaked canvas, even buildings, roads, sidewalks – they all grew numb. As if you look at the world in the light of death. Death seems what the gloomy autumn’s all about, death.
A yellow leaf with reddish chaps is taking his first and last flight, falling from a moist half-dead branch and with light irreversibility spinning round like a feather in the lull of the chilly autumnal morning. His life can’t be told from the other leaves’ lives, it was not long, it was not short. Like a strange slumber full of air and sunbeams, his life was. And here is the yellow leaf with reddish abrasions, with lone stares of the drowsy branches on him, sliding to the void, where the black emery asphalt and the mute filth will fold him in their adhesive arms of disappearing life. Where the million deaths of red, orange, yellow, brown of all the impossible tints are lying, being trodden down by the soles of passersby and the spits of steady rain. And I wonder if he knows, that whirling yellow one, that he is the LAST leaf of that autumn.
By Anton Danilov, 4-LDT
to be continued |