Dear Autumn

Hey baby girl,

Long time, no talk, huh? It only seemed fair that I write once more of my eternal love for you, seeing as it is the season you were named for after all. I feel you in that tingle in my fingertips as I type this. A bit of numbness never hurt anybody, so perhaps your silence these long months — near on a year now — is just your temperament mimicking the season’s nippiness perfectly.

I long to hear your voice, even once, as a woman grown and self-possessed, but I recognize that I do not deserve that. I wait still in the margins. My arms are ever ready, coiled with strength should you stumble and need a savior in such a trans giantess’s body as mine.

I hold the ache each day by learning to deflect my mind from you, but this season is my weakness. You are all around me — in the weather, in the leaves. You are embodied in the shade of your hair, a pine-straw littered with golden light. Your eyes are like the pines, deep and pure. How I yearn for you, to shelter you now as I should have so long ago then.

I write these little letters to you and hide them, like a coward, in the digital recesses of the site I built to house my work. I add to them here and there when the ache grows too strong and my crusted heart breaks wide anew, awaiting the scar of tomorrow. I admit I fail to hold on to hope any longer. I stand far off, praying, asking the invisible Father to be the father I could never be — nor the mother I hoped I might become.

I miss you. The you you became, the you you are becoming, and the one you will be.

I fade with age and fend off bitterness with worship and these writings. I admit I’m doing a lousy job keeping the faith and holding the light for you when all this time has passed like sand spilled from a shattered hourglass.

What can I do, save send you my love from afar? To show you how much I adore you — how unworthy I am of you.

Still, I cherish your being, beloved child, Autumn.

— Eiri Waters