ARI KOONTZ
for the harvest moon
1.
I go nowhere in autumn without an acorn in my pocket. One or two at least, if not closer to a dozen – tokens of all the walks I’ve taken, all the times I’m running ten minutes late and still find myself squatting down to rescue another from the sidewalk. It’s some kind of squirrely instinct, a compulsion to gather and tuck away these little tokens of wonder – the different shapes and colors! the bumps and ridges and cracks! – telling myself they’ll come in handy for the leaner days ahead even though I have no use and no place for them outside my scuffed-up jeans. Maybe I love them because they are the future: how often do you cup an unborn universe in the palm of your hand? Or maybe it’s just that they are the perfect thing to grasp at when you think you have nothing.
2.
I want to be an oak tree by the time I die. At 25 I’m not quite there yet; I think I’m still a red leaf maple. Before I changed my pronouns I was an aspen, all quivering leaves and curling bark, waiting for someone to tell me I could keep growing. When my day comes I hope I will be wise and strong, marked and faded, a home for soft creatures who chirp and squeak and sigh; but for now it is sugar season and I’m storing up as much sweet as I can.
3.
I make myself a real breakfast every Saturday morning. Not the kind you’d buy in a diner, I mean the kind cooked by someone who loves you very much and puts extra chocolate chips in the batter. If it burns on the bottom, all the better. I’ve got hours and hours to try again. On the days when I am really feeling myself, I’ll lay it out on the fanciest dish I can find and spend far too long taking pictures, dragging the fork around artfully, arranging the fruit slices just so. If you come over one of these weekends I’ll make a plate for you too, and a steaming cup of whatever tea you like best.
4.
There are so many friends I don’t really talk to anymore and none of them are trying to stay in touch. At least once a week, I open Instagram and see a post from someone and fall in love with them all over again: the places we’ve been, the secrets we shared, the deep-rooted feelings only they can pull up. I message them, hey, we should catch up one of these days! and they’ll say yeah, of course! and both of us know that the call won’t go through. But what a gift it is, really, to have adored that past tense, to clear out your heart and make room for more.
5.
My chest hurts less now than it did a year ago; the sky is still hazy but there’s a cool breeze coming in. I am getting better at holding my body like a fledgling bird, like something fragile but so very alive. Even on the not-good days, I almost always remember how to breathe. It’s so easy to feel the two steps forward and one step back but wait, hear that, feel it in your bones: you are still going forward. You are going to get there soon.
6.
When I make a new playlist on Spotify, it auto-fills as “My Playlist #109,” which seems like far too many for a person who listens to the same three artists on repeat, until you remember that my house number was 109 for fifteen and a half years and I’ve been collecting tunes since way before that, when I nestled in my mother’s womb to the sounds of traffic and coffee and birds, when I built my cells around whatever praise she whispered at the moment of my very first kick and was ready from day one to meet the world ears-first, which means I’ve never had a moment without music or a feeling without a song and so I keep collecting and building and listening until even silence has a soundtrack.
7.
This is the part where I tried to write for hours about the moon, about how she whirls and glows and obscures whole universes, about the way she watches over me on my way back home. This is the part where I gave up because the moon’s brilliance cannot be contained in a single paragraph and no matter how hard I dream it, I will never be able to swallow her whole.
Ari Koontz (they/he) is a queer nonbinary writer and artist fascinated by birds, stars, and other bright & curious things. They are currently a creative nonfiction MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University, where they spend as much time as possible in the woods or by the lake. Ari’s work has been previously published in Wizards In Space Magazine, Oyster River Pages, Ruminate, and Under The Gum Tree, among others. You can find him online at arikoontz.com or on Twitter @arioctober.