August did send its warning to the northeast: that week-long false break from humidity. A calendar stillness.

At least, the weight of sunset falls square on my shoulders now. At least, the night bites back, rightly blue to righteous black, the truth of summer wearing down. And I’m so much more alert for it. Losing light always hurts so good. Like a spell coating the air, tunneling me into the dark of academia. I adjust my focus; I’m studious. I’m pent up in a vision.

The seasonal clock insists that I soon be employed (be stable before the darkness). But software engineering interviews are part of an evil machinery. Some are a timed test, akin to the SAT or GRE. So I’m studying for them. Two problems may be pulled from a pool of 600. Since I started, my heart’s been pounding at night before bed.

Tough! This is dark academia all right! A few weeks then to link my very physical anxiety to its source. Surprise, surprise, it’s the job search. And I’m cursing my bias toward intuition: the body knows first, when the mind knows last.

'How I only realize what I want at the moment I attain it, my mind the final part of me to know.'

(Maggie Millner, Couplets, 7)

Studying is hard. Solving these problems require you think like a computer, tracking the minutiae of events in chronological order (iterations) in enclosed input/output systems. The goal is to determine the optimal algorithm. But my brain does not process things like this. I do things sans structure at the outset, and rarely sequentially, whether its sketching out a written piece or a plan for the next year. Broad stroke first. The order comes later.

Often, I’ll arrive at a decision internally, the consciousness of it coming later.

The library closes, life barrels forward. The chill creeps in. The sun sets too early, then way way way too early. Weather like this triggers a sixth sense. It is so deeply tied to place, environmental, felt in every tiny fiber. It sets the rhythm of the region back on track: so I adjust.

Through and through. Fall lets me lock into time, the sequence, the red leaf falling and fading to tatters of brown. Thank you, fall, for I need this sensibility to power through these schoolgirl assessments.

You let me live the way I like to, interlaced among time. You are my season (the one i was born in).

Nothing like losing light at 4:30pm on an October weekday. No time like New England fall to cast nostalgia to the sky. And no rest for the students of life. For fall is falling soon.