October arrives in here sans the drama
No gusts of cold wind, no trembling branches, no grand announcements of winter. It creeps in quietly; like a sigh after the monsoon’s exhaustion, like a song half-remembered. The afternoons are still warm, the nights just begin to cool. You wake up one morning and find that the sunlight has changed; less gold, more amber. The air smells faintly of restraint.
It is not yet winter, but something inside the air hints at it.
A promise, soft and deliberate.
The city begins to live in anticipation. Streets shimmer with that in-between glow neither wet with rain nor dry with dust. People walk a little slower, not from laziness but from a strange contentment that comes with knowing something gentle is on its way. The body remembers how to expect comfort: a shawl on the balcony chair, a cup warming your palms, the quiet miracle of a breeze that doesn’t sting.
And perhaps, October is not about the season at all.
It is about that waiting. That hushed joy of what’s to come, when you’re not there yet. The world teaches us to chase the event, the climax, the moment of arrival. But what if the real beauty lies in the moments before?
Like the sight of a coffee cup steaming on the table before you take the first sip; the aroma richer than the taste itself.
Like the last weekday, when plans for rest are more thrilling than rest itself.
Like the final hour before a journey begins, when everything is still possible.
Like the days before a holiday, when the heart is already elsewhere, alive with the imagination of escape.
We live for beginnings disguised as endings. For “almost” that refuse to resolve.
In Chennai, winter never truly arrives; it only teases. The mornings carry a faint coolness that fades before noon, the evenings borrow a mild hush that never deepens into chill. And yet, people still talk about “winter coming” as if it were a guest, they adore but never truly meet. We prepare for it anyway: taking out long-sleeved shirts that we’ll probably never wear, brewing stronger coffee, opening windows at dawn just to feel something. It’s not the cold we long for; it’s the longing itself.
Because waiting sharpens the senses.
It makes the world more vivid.
Anticipation is the mind’s way of falling in love with time.
When winter finally arrives; if one can call Chennai’s polite coolness “winter” it feels like a secret revealed too soon. The magic dissolves into routine. The mornings are no longer becoming chilly; they simply are. The coffee loses its ceremony and becomes just caffeine again. The holidays, once thrilling in their promise, settle into predictability. The moment we possess what we wanted, the wanting disappears; and with it, the glow that made everything luminous.
And so, October lingers in me as a lesson:
that perhaps joy isn’t about getting there.
It’s about moving toward.
The heart is not designed for possession, but for pursuit. It beats most vividly when it knows something is near, but not yet ours.
Maybe that’s why the last weekday hums with energy while the weekend lies limp with leisure.
Why the unopened message, the paused song, the unsaid word; all carry more electricity than what follows.
Why we stand at our windows , feeling the faint suggestion of a breeze and smiling as if winter itself had brushed our cheek.
Because we know
it’s not the winter we love.
It’s the anticipation of it.
The promise that something new might come, even if it never really does.
That’s what keeps us alive.
And so, I let October stay inside me.
A month that never fully arrives, yet never truly leaves.
A reminder that in this city of endless summer, it’s the waiting the soft ache of almost that feels most like home.
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