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Back To Reality//October 232nd, 2025

 I heard someone say, the other day, that we are heading into the final week of summer before Labor Day, before it's 'back to reality'.

This was such a strange thing for me to hear. 

The season that September will usher in, has always been the dream state for me. 

'Back to reality' is a phrase I associate with coming back from a vacation, or the end of a magical event. I have never once thought of entering the fall season as the end of something.

Fall is the event. 

When I think of summer, I think of the mundane. The bright, generic reality that people seem to love to exist within. It's a time where everyone blends in, but I stand out, my eyes water-bleeding from the sunlight, my body exhausted and my energy zapped from the heat. It feels like being trapped in a cubicle at a 9-5 job, working hours of overtime every day. 

I don't know that I can think of anything more mundane and constricting than summer. This is the escape people crave, but summer, for me, is not an escape at all. 

It is a prison. 

It is my own reality when I'd rather be asleep and dreaming. 

I dream of leaves in shades or orange and red and yellow, some a burnt brown, crunching to bits when you step on them. I dream of pumpkins; a world of orange, some glowing at night on doorsteps, a welcome or a warning, who's to say for sure? I dream of ghosts and witches and bats, and a world where spiders are revered for a time as opposed to feared, and where everything else that doesn't fit in, very briefly does. 

I dream of a home where I can never stay too long. A world that exists for a time...before I am forced 'back to reality'. 

Summer seems to last a hundred years, maybe more. The others act like it's so fleeting, but I can barely remember a time now where I wasn't uncomfortably hot. My memories of fall and winter feel like that of an alternate universe, of a dream I created, or a story I made up. How could anyone prefer this to that? A burning, boring world, put up against the colorful and magical...when was the last time we even had a holiday? Nothing to celebrate, nothing to decorate for...This is 'reality' in its dullest form.

If there are people who truly see the fall as 'reality', as some mundane existence that makes them long for what came before, that is something I can not even begin to comprehend. I think I feel sorry for them, in a way, that they can't see what a beautiful dream it is. Maybe they feel the same about me, and my feelings toward summer. Maybe I am the weird one.

But I wouldn't have it any other way.

And so, I wait, just a little while longer, to go back to my dream, of my perfect reality. 

I only hope I'm not forced to awaken too quickly.




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