It has a revolutionary flavor and it comes always after a long summer. The streets filled with students, the theater billboards packed with intriguing films and the smell of the newly printed ink flying out of the bookstores as though it were calling you. Right when you miss the rain and the touch of your dark jacket it comes, October, my favorite month of the year.
An old Stan Getz record spinning that song, Autumn Leaves, and the memories of the last summer being wiped out by the cool wind blowing from the mountain range. The balcony still open, the yellowish top silhouette of the neighborhood and the aroma of the coffee rising to me, sitting at my desk, my sharpened charcoal pencil, the colored case, and a blank paper, waiting.
October always feels like this for me, like the beginning of a college semester in a charming and yet undiscovered city, far away from home, surrounded by lunatic friends who read out loud and never go to sleep and think that youth is a life decision that will never be revoked.
But October is often too short. I guess because it is just a month, 31 days, lasting for less than I wish. I wait for its arrival this year, again the streets will bloom in yellow and the movies will be released and I will play that record and my pencils will be there and even a few of those crazy fellows, but still I fear… some years will have already gone by and this October a slim autumnal gloominess may hit my childish drawings, for the very first time.
