catherine, my dearest friend.

From the window in my kitchen, I can see brown leaves. Autumn is here. We have been cautiously waiting  for it, so it arrived. I allow myself to stare at the outside for a full minute, sipping my cinnamon tea. I leave  the cup on the table, and I rush to wake Catherine up. 

My dearest friend is sleeping on the pavement. That doesn’t come as a surprise.  

Catherine’s bedroom. A record or two by Nina Simone lying on the floor. Empty plates everywhere. A fork  on the bed, between the sheets. Curtains are closed. She is my dearest friend, and she is sleeping on the floor,  again. 

She looks at me. 

“It is not like last time. I swear.”  

I lay next to her. Two ladies privileged enough to have somewhere safe to sleep in, lying on their floor. 

“I read Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter last night. Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again,”  Catherine says. 

I touch her soft blonde hair. I want to tell her that there’s no Hell that needs her back. There is no Hell. When Catherine (Cat, to me) was first diagnosed with that, she was a stranger to me. We met when she was  looking for a roommate. I was sixteen and she was nineteen. It was the first time I was on my own, although  I wasn’t, as I was with Catherine. In the beginning, we were shy, young, and embarrassed to be human. Our  walls were not thick enough to hold the rumor of our tears. One night, we met in the kitchen only to discover  we were both fragile. It must have been eight in the evening, and we made it four in the morning. That night,  we talked about rain, poets, records she collected, drawings I made, “Why would a man do so much but ask  you on a date”, her aunt, my English origins, her Italian origins, “See? Rainer Maria Rilke complained about  Poste Italiane one century ago, nothing got better”, “that’s absurd”, what a bad century that was, the Nazis,  the fact that she was a bassist once but now she hadn’t picked it up in a year, and she felt lost, the fact that  she actually wanted to learn how to play the violin but bass was cheaper, how I think that she does look a  bassist, and how no matter how many times people try to explain that to me, I will never understand what Gluten  actually is. 

At four in the morning, that’s when we heard the sound of brown leaves falling on the grass, just to get  caressed by the wind. “When I was in Hell, I couldn’t notice the sound of brown leaves falling,” Cat said. 

I knew exactly what she meant. In case you couldn’t guess, Hell was a place in which Cat would explore,  only to look for a way to come back here. “Here” is certainly no heaven, but the planet is alive and flowing.  

I loved walking in the forest. I always loved everything that has something to do with trees, really. My most  personal instinct is running. Sometimes, I feel the need to run in the middle of the city. I often give up on  that, despite trying to hold myself while visiting a museum, or the canteen of the university. I remember last  year, when I was dating a problematic yet luckily forgettable man, and I felt the need to start running while  we were sitting on a bench in the park. I never looked back. That is where I left him. I shall run between the trees, forever. 

My favorite piece of clothing is and will forever be an orange jumper Cat knitted for me last autumn. It is the  only orange piece of clothing I will ever own. When she handed me the gift, she told me she was well aware that I  saw Me and Orange being two parallel lines, not destined to meet, never. She also told me she couldn’t care  less, that Orange was the most autumnal color she could find, and that by faith, it was also the only color  available at the store on a Sunday - the shop gets new stuff every Monday. Catherine grew up with her aunt,  it was her who taught her how to knit. That’s what all she had. Growing up, Cat was bored. You wouldn’t tell  that based on the way she is now, but Boredom was her enemy. That is how she began to be mad at herself,  not allowing herself to be bored. That only made her more bored. At the age of fifteen, she wouldn’t spend a  single night alone or manically studying something random - she had every kind of phase, the deadliest being  Greek Mythology, which led her to the loss of quite a few people. She has no memory of enjoying playing  around brown leaves, she once told me. That is the true reason behind her frustration: the inability to notice or remember the daily details.  

I am happy I met her, Cat. Her feminine energy keeps me warm. I am a woman, too, that is perhaps why I am  so aware of it. Being a woman. Being warm. Being a home rather than a house. Being the warm yellow spot on a brown leave. Being on fire. 

“What can I do?”, I ask her, answering Woolf’s quote. 

“It isn’t me. It’s Virginia Woolf,” Cat states.

“Oh, please. I bought you that book. What I mean is, what can I do?” 

Catherine stood up so fast that I got scared. 

“One cannot force the sound of brown leaves falling…”, she affirms, looking outside the window. “… I am scared I find being human disgusting.” 

“Cat,” - I want to suggest going for a swim, but she won’t let me. 

“You know… it’s that moment of the year in which I suggest to myself I am dying from a not-so-rare deadly  sickness. I am sick of it! My veins disgust me, the blood flowing inside me is warm and I want it to be fresh,  to be clean. I am sick of it! I am guilty of being alive, you know? There are a lot of people out there who deserve my conditions more than I do. All I do is nurture bad feelings and then feel bad for having them.  Why do I get to have so many chances?”  

Last year, one day when we went to the supermarket together to get groceries, Catherine told me she thought  being human was disgusting. The thought assaulted her and she immediately felt like throwing up. We were  in front of the fridge with the animal flash inside.  I look at her. I don’t know what to think or say. Perhaps there is nothing behind all of this suffering. No intentions of a greater God to destroy us or not destroy us. Nothing that fuels these coincidences we live off. Nothing that fuels life.  No reason for a kid to be born somewhere he can be safe, and for another one to come to life surrounded by  uncertainty. 

“Oh, Lord, I am so sick of it.” 

Cat began to cry. Her soft hair blended with her wet eyes and covered them. Outrageous. 

I think warm tea could be good. I rush into the kitchen and I add some cinnamon, some sugar, and water in a  pot. The tea bag is the last thing I put in. Cat’s aunt trick.  

From our kitchen, I can hear my friend put on Revolution (pts. 1 and 2) by Nina Simone. I hand her a cup of tea as I enter her room. 

She tells me I am her best friend. We dance. Her eyes are still empty, but I know she is trying her best. There are lighter autumns yet to come.