[This post originally appeared in Quail Bell Magazine, a place for real and unreal stories from around the world.]
To the fear of many, summer is waning. Autumn, they say, lulls things to death. That means trees once wreathed in green, the bloom of summer love, and animals who prepare to close their eyes for a full season, soon to be confused for corpses by passersby. Yet, as the rest of the land dies, Scorpio comes alive. She rouses and blinks a series of blinks like a song. She taps her multiple legs and stretches her tail before cracking it like a whip. This is the time the heavens have given her. From October 23rd to November 21st, this Water sign emerges from the depths of her dark water kingdom and scampers across the earth with stubborn determination.
As a Scorpio, I feel at ease in autumn. It is the only season I fully trust, meaning that I spend the rest of the year longing for it. I embrace autumn's chill and the swirling leaves. I adore the evenings spent curled up beneath a mountain of blankets, with a book in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. I think of the dearly departed even more often than usual. My thoughts will flitter from those I've lost to visions of ghosts and musings on the great men and women of history. I'm compelled to walk through cemeteries and study old photographs. I want to spend more time alone, reflecting, sometimes obsessively re-playing the same memories in my mind until I exhaust myself.
My idea of an adventurous night changes meaning in autumn. The sky blackens and the moon comes out sooner in the day. On an autumn night, I am even more passionate, spontaneous, and fierce than usual. Lock up your children and small dogs. Make sure your neighbors have a spare key and your mother's phone number posted on the 'fridge. I won't paint the town red; I'll paint it blood-red.
That is not to say I'll transform into Raskolnikov at sundown. It just means that I become strange, maybe a tad mad--compulsively eating, wandering the streets like a guttersnipe, driving in search of something never articulated.
Of course, I refuse to disclose all of my secrets. I am, after all, a Scorpio, a lady of mystery and even more so come autumn.