Autism is in the Air

By: Master Bates

I’m so excited for Autism! The colors, the cool breeze, pumpkin spice, what’s there not to love?

My favorite season is upon us. Oh autism, I toast to thee. Despite the horrors of school midterms, you have shocked us with your gorgeous blessings: burnt vermillions, effervescent yellows, splashes of ochre, and enchanting umbers, all of which cascade so gorgeously against the gay streets of Boston, the standing bricks themselves coated in your majesty. Autism, you have brought us peace between the summer's oppressive heat and the bite of East Coast winters. Soon your leaves shall finish their dance and your trees, their tresses once awash in half a rainbow, will stand as barren sentinels to usher in the long dark days. For now, though, the air has yet to fully chill, and the frosts are far from settling into the cracks of the old brownstones. 

Scarves and caps have been taken up like standards against you, Autism. Multicolored defenses. Newbury Street has set its summer clothes out for sale and traded in for army green puffers and cream-colored mittens as the displays of Nordstrom and Uniqlo have adopted your colors for the time being. Beautiful men and women in store windows boast of your finery with wide, white smiles, layered up against the oncoming cold. They do not dance as your leaves do but lie stationary and corpse-like, their vinyl fronts already beginning to peel up at the corners. In a month they will be traded out again, replaced with new beautiful people holding hot cups of coffee to ward off Winter– your muted reds exchanged for the corporate reds and greens of Christmas. Everything looks brighter in the winter as the sky sits more darkly overhead, its belly filled with snow, ready at any moment to be released in a tumult onto the city below, coating completely in white when you leave us, Autism. 

So I beg you, Autism, let your leaves linger for a bit longer. Give us another week of brightness, even as you usher in the decay of fall, keep us in good weather. Let us walk among your finery, even as it wilts before us, for a while. Don’t go so swiftly into the swirling darkness. As you are our specter against the night, a jack-o-lantern, gleaming candle-lit into the dark protecting from Halloween spirits as you work against the all-consuming force of Winter’s stark howl.