When No Leaf is Left Unturned: A Spooky Turn of Events

Upon August’s end, pumpkin poppers, spiced lattes, cereals, morning oven buns, and assortment of other Cinderella-vehicular inspired products, hit the market.  That cohort of people with fond memories of chemical-hair dye, Sun-In, who relish Mr. Softee jingles co-mingling with Monster Mash, unleashed their fury at this man made attempt to prematurely end summer. Compared to the year before, however, there was a marked drop in displeasure. And this is in spite of this year’s initial onslaught of pumpkin paraphernalia predating last year’s then unprecedented arrival. Perhaps even the most summer-obsessed did not take offense to Halloween’s early arrival because the idea of time moving on spawns some type of hope that the unfortunate events will become a distant memory.

It’s like my father quips incessantly with regard to my stalling recovery from anorexia: time does not stop for anyone. The world will continue to turn with or without you. Not a very cheery outlook, I agree. But then again, we’re approaching Halloween and thankfully, calls for making merry have not yet infiltrated Wal-Mart’s rotating campfire cookouts, back-to-school, trick-or-treat section just yet.

The events from this year include a debilitating airborne virus, an economic blunder that enabled the rise of industries once on the brink of extinction – think pantry staple legume products in the United States that include beans, lentils, peas, and even peanuts, to rise in sales by more than double- a critical juncture between racial tension and inequity, and a scrutinized look into policing without due purpose. Additionally, political discourse during a presidential election year that continues to brim with controversy and uncertainty further complicated matters, so to speak, as the main manufacturers in the legume industry and other Hispanic specialty culinary products, GOYA, now teetered on possible bankruptcy. Calls for boycotting their products emerged because the CEO supported President Trump who racially persecuted Hispanics, the very demographic his empire was erected on.

A half Hispanic, myself, I can say that I have not touched a bean aside from preservative-free locally churned hummus and cereal made from chickpeas, during the entirety of the shelter-in-place: from mid-Spring and well into the summer. Ironically, however, I likened myself to a burgeoning bean pod: bumps, peaks and valleys, that popped from beneath smoothed out skin as I continued to weight restore and work on building muscle mass. Once June arrived, however, this string bean became dehydrated, and like the basil, chives, and other herbs growing in the backyard, began to shrivel up and wrinkle underneath the strong sun rays. I became flaccid as I stopped adhering to any meal plan, and pushed myself to some impossible standard of fitness at home. This is my now.

“Take one string at a time and unravel it,” my father told me. He has a way with words that immediately pulls me to Earth, grounds me, and forces me to engage my brain cells like I did all the years prior to only thinking about food and movement. When I studied anything, I let text linger across my tongue, sit inside my head, before I would break it a part, mindfully. Instead of a fork or spoon, I used a pen. Instead of ingesting the words like morsels of food part of a meal plan, I digested their meaning and absorbed their value weighed in mental growth, fortitude, and understanding.

I am an interlocked web of worries, compulsions, and I am stuck. He seems awakened, like someone who has seen the light, showered, dressed and ready for work. I can take the end of each strand of web, breaking down the dream catcher-like web into isolated entities. I hear that. I see that. I want that.

The spooky season is upon us and yet the dream catcher, purported to enable positive dreams to pass through the gaps formed by intersecting strands of thread and nightmares to be caught in the intersecting strands so that they do not permeate one’s resting mind, does nothing to quell the monsters that lurk all around me. All I feel are my dreams, ambitions, and goals, being caught up in a childhood bedroom with bubblegum pink walls. Instead, of the sweet scent of Bazooka warmly wrapping around me, reminding me of my sweet future, I feel as though I have stepped on a wad of gum that leaves me attached, stuck to the ground beneath me.

I wish for the loopholes that the visual of a dream catcher represented because they are akin to lingering hope. Perhaps there is a way to maneuver my way around potholes and roadblocks, speed bumps and uncoordinated traffic lights that cause me to stop every few seconds at a red light, my destination in the distance, as I sit with my first-world problems: Guilt exponentially proliferating as I sit in the Fiat 500 pop in a color that is a cross between a baby blue and pistachio green.

I feel stuck. I feel that the market all around me is saturated, that leaves have already been un-turned, and that there is no value in my presence. I cannot be a stakeholder when I have a stake wrenched squarely through my heart. It’s the spooky season, and when the antidote that is a bulb of garlic has no affect – no roasting of garlic has caused me to recoil inward and opt for the aluminum wrapped order of garlic knots or fluffy and stretchy garlic naan – then the final resort is a wooden stake, according to urban legend.

As with most urban legends, their veracity is questionable, and so I have begun to seek out answers in the boondocks. I have taken to hiking, mistakenly identifying the preserved landscape for being paths not yet trodden, when in fact, the earth has been stamped on, the rocks have been nudged, and the journey has been made time and time again. Perhaps my New Yorker city roots have made me naïve – naïve about suburbia automatically being an isolated realm and free market.

A genuine soul who approached me when I was stressed, alone, and literally sitting alone on the mezzanine of the high rise Ivy League residential hall, messaged me on social media. He referred to my stressful 24-hour living Instagram video story where I mentioned the absence of directions on my hiking trip that made me scale a mountain and trek through a laborious forest. “Missing signage always = turn around,” he said. And suddenly, my father’s voice rang in my ears again. He told me to change my route.

In a classic devil’s advocate, semantics-focused argument that hardly tamed my ego so much as it stroked my penchant for academia, I accused him of suggesting that I was lost, which I took offense to. Instead, he said, that he alluded to my course was flawed due to navigation. Think: A global positioning system, or GPS. Sometimes, when traveling, satellite connection will be lost, causing detours. Then again, today, he suggested that his employees, business partners, and anyone whose path I crossed, knew that something was “wrong” with me; that signs of success, like career moves, were nonexistent. If that was not offensive, well, I don’t know what is.

That being said, my friend said that “in both life” and “in the wilderness,” - a distinction that I appreciated because hearing someone philosophically say that life is wilderness itself, well, that would prevent me from taking him seriously - there is no path not traveled. Things have been touched already, but that does not necessitate one to move and exert energy on finding a mythical location that doesn’t exist.

During these past two weeks of fall foliage sightings, I have not felt autumnal in the least. Masks muffle schools’ cacophony of sounds that usually reverberate across the nation, with study hall sessions for standardized examinations, dances, recitals, and practices. The air is thick with humidity from morning till evening. No amount of limited edition scented air fresheners and candles can provide the feelings of crisp air across once tanned skin, suddenly turned a shade of porcelain. I walk on leaves strewn, but I don’t hear a crunch, the sound deafened because the leaf has been muddled in the rainfall. The rainfall, too, seems silenced by the sound of the leaves that cover the ground. This isn’t natural. If there is any welcoming attribute of rain, it’s the audible ping and pang against the ground.

While I feel that the number of years I have occupied this Earth ages me – 30 – and that my millenial generation is now outdated by a single letter, ‘Z’, this eerie ambience has caused a youthful desire to resurface. That want is for snow to be in the forecast. I want some semblance of realism in what seems like a twilight zone. I want nothing more than a blanket of snow to cover the ground in silence. I want to see the eggplant haze of electrical luminescence reflecting off of white fluff. I want the barren branches poking through the marshmallow-like precipitate that accumulate upon them, punctuating the night sky to become ignited like S’mores roasting. My world is teeming with angst for a past and a future reunited, and for daydreams to materialize.