After Europe in March, Peru in April and May, and Maine in August, the quiet should have been welcome. It mostly was. It also had the audacity to ask harder questions than the loud parts of the year ever had.
There was one good, ordinary afternoon near the end of the month: a new friend named Rose was touring Santa Fe Community College and I tagged along, which sounds unremarkable because it was, and that was entirely the point. Campus grass, September light arriving sideways at that particular high-desert angle, an afternoon with no agenda and therefore, somehow, everything it needed. Real life at a human scale. You forget that the world operates this way when you've spent enough months treating airports as a personality trait.
I think that is why the ordinary afternoon with Rose at Santa Fe Community College stayed with me so clearly. It was not competing with spectacle, and because of that it could show me what my life actually feels like when it is not being measured against a plane ticket. Campus grass, late light, a friend doing something practical with her day, and me tagging along without any larger agenda—there is deep dignity in that scale of living. September asked me to notice it on purpose.
The apology poem pairing also made sense for the month because stillness tends to surface whatever wants repair. When I am moving constantly, I can postpone certain reckonings. September did not let me do that. It gave me human-scale time again, and human-scale time is where accountability tends to find me. Not punishment, not melodrama—just the clearer sight that comes when a person has stopped sprinting long enough to hear what still needs tending.
Apology
In pain's grip, I stumbled and fell, Hurt others as I sank in my well. Regret now fills the space inside, For forgiveness, I set aside pride.
Read it in Echoes From the Heart →I trust entries like this because they do not rely on exotic scenery to make their point. September 2024 mattered because it returned me to proportion. After enough travel, proportion can feel like relief. It certainly did here. The journal needs those months too: the ones where nothing huge happens and therefore the truth has room to become audible.
The fact that the day with Rose was so ordinary is what made it memorable. I needed a month that reminded me I was still a person inside a town, on a campus lawn, in late afternoon light, and not merely a body moving from one large experience to the next. September returned that ordinary self to me gently, and I am still grateful for the softness of the lesson.
If I'm honest — and a journal is the precisely correct place to be honest — September had weight. The busy months carry things for you that you don't fully feel until you stop. There were people I owed better. There were moments I looked back on with the specific discomfort of knowing I hadn't been my best self in them. You cannot outrun that. I have tried that route. It loops back around every single time.
I paired this month with Apology not as a confession but as a commitment. That poem is about what it means to hurt people while you're hurting yourself, and then to actually choose differently. September was the choosing. Some of it I got right. Some of it I'm still working on, which is, I think, the honest answer for most of us, most of the time.