Your Guide to a Performative Autumn
By Yasmin Hadizad
Curate a thirty hour fall playlist and four-hundred-pin Autumn Pinterest Board. For the ideal effect, title both of these using a Steve Lacy song lyric (or simply: “Sweater Weather”).
Create an extremely pretentious and unrealistic fall TBR. Include a Brontë book, a Tartt, a Christie, and at least one giant classic fantasy series.
Pick your favourite fall shows or challenge yourself to watch something that isn’t Gilmore Girls or Supernatural. (Feel absolutely no pressure to leave your comfort zone).
Assemble a minimum of three standard fall outfits (this is where the Pinterest board comes in); wear faux-leather boots, Converse, Doc Martens, or Mary Janes. Wear a musky-woodsy perfume and lots of cherry red lip gloss.
Develop an obnoxiously naive glimmer in your eyes, and a generally awe-filled expression to your face. Let your lips part when you feel the first autumn chill.
Bake. Apple pie, pumpkin pie, cinnamon scones, chai blondies, cookies and cream cinnamon rolls, maple cookies, chocolate chip pumpkin bread, banana and blueberry coffee-cake muffins, breakfast biscuits to go with your morning cup and your apricot jam, snickerdoodles and chocolate wafers, s’mores, upside-down apple cake.
Go outside in a tweed jacket and read on a bench by Middlesex or by the Thames River. Look up when you hear the geese flying overhead.
Take the scenic route on your way to class. Stop to watch blue jays and the grey squirrels. Pick up acorns and turn them over in your fingers pensively, jump when a crab apple skims the tip of your nose on its way to the ground (thud). Collect pretty leaves. Observe the way the sun filters through the orange and red and yellow, until people start to stare at you.
Go to a farm – preferably a pumpkin or apple farm – and pick. Sigh happily when you hear crunch.
Plan a Halloween movie night, complete with thick blankets, pyjamas, cocoa, and throw pillows. Have the best time.
Attend a bonfire and tell ghost stories.
Plan your Halloween costume a month in advance and go trick-or-treating.
Go to a Halloween party, or stay home with a hot cup of tea and your favourite fall mystery.
Get yourself a pumpkin spice latte or a pumpkin chai or a slice of pumpkin pie. Basically, stop by a cafe for something pumpkin, and feel mad at The Spoke for not having released their fall menu yet (seriously, guys…it’s October).
Write poetry in the grass and swat at the wasps that circle your head.
Open your windows and put on classical music while you study; pretend you’re holding a quill pen and studying for your stats exam in the lantern-light of a Victorian library.
Don’t leave your overhead lights on ever. Make sure you tell everyone how much you like mood lighting. Buy a pumpkin-vanilla scented candle, or better yet, make one.
Look at the open sky and wish you were a deer in the woods. Look for foxes among the bushes. Squeal happily when you see chipmunks in the grass.
Live, because no one else will do it for you.
Cry over your best fall reads. Cry over your comfort shows. Cry because of how much you love the leaves. Tear up in public and make sure everyone else sees it so they can remember that they’re human.
Make sure they feel it all with you.
“I’m so glad I get to live in a world where there are Octobers, aren’t you?”
– Anne, Anne With An E
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