Ten

I am an October youth.

I was conceived of the new year while the wintry wind blew in gales across the land. The nearby southern California ocean lapped up at the shore, omnisciently smiling, knowing the virtue and vice and vainglory ensconced in the hearts of men. A small shack shook with the rumbling joy and laughter of two young girls, borne to a younger couple: one with curls that fell back into a crescent moon of hair about his head while he labored to outfit feet and know the intricate placements of ink upon paper, the other with the full belly of motherhood that kept me warm and comforted while she whispered songs of love into my guarded chamber and selflessly gave and gave and gave.

I was born to the sounds of coliseum cheers and the wooden crisp of leaves underfoot, into a season of autumn fit to occupy the short transition of the decades. The Librae stars of balance were gymnastically suspended high over the roof of my birthing room, meticulously calculating every aspect of my character. I breathed two months of the fading air of dance and color, science fiction and escapism, musical revolution and hedonism; the rest of my oxygen comes from an age of technology and fiber optics, music video and the digital awakening, global capitalism and cultural introversion.

I was reared in the haunts of San Diego county, where I ran amongst backyard fruit trees and dirt trails, digging holes to house figurines and swimming in the shallow depths of plastic patio pools. My family later migrated to the Sacramento valley nestled alongside Northern California's Sierra Nevada playground. Here I rambled with the city and explored the stepped foothills as my legs lengthened and my heartbeat slowed, and the pupal stage of adolescence stole my innocence, transforming my fragile boyhood into the hopelessness of man.

I was married in the lingering sunlight of early August. Her hair was kissed with the breath of eternity, the buds of unknowing flowers adorning a sensual garden in her eyes, her smile wide enough for the both of us to sleep in. Our dreams merged with the coming of each other's arms at night and the coming of the full cycle of maternity, which would soon realize itself upon us in a perpetual cradle of life and humanity.

I've met the radiance of the sun sinking behind the green resoluteness of Montecito's hillsides; I've torn across plates of fractured mountain shale while parting curtains of drifting snowflake near the saddle of Mount Timpanogos; I've maneuvered past blockades of police cars and spotlight-wielding helicopters while returning to a humble apartment in a developing city outskirt; I've attempted the twisted osmosis of language with the locals of a Mexican port town as we eyed and saluted each other with respect to our mutually obligated existences; I've sensed sadness in the drooped eyes of age that have been without companionship for far too long to remember (but where joviality and youthful insouciance have always overpowered their melancholy counterparts); I've logged thousands of miles in the annals of my memory, recording journalistically the off-ramps and highwayside landmarks that define the few languorously broad boundaries of our western United States.

I fell as fruit from the vine under a fall skyline. I fit squarely within the mold made from the tenth day of the tenth month. A bit of the Indian clay of October flows thickly through the blood in my arteries, past that heart that beats so steady and those fingers that so wish to be dragged sempiternally through sand, up to the mystical grey of my mind and the seemingly endless nature of an ephemeral existence.

I am a youth of October. And through that which has made me all that I am - October, you are mine now, if just for a day.