The weather has been strange lately; too warm for October, too bright for this late in the year. Each weekend feels borrowed from summer, the air stubbornly refusing to cool. I walk to class through heat that smells faintly like sunscreen and pavement, and I can’t help feeling like the season has overstayed its welcome. The world seems confused about what it’s supposed to be.
In my English class this week, we talked about the intentional fallacy, the idea that an author’s intended meaning doesn’t determine how a work is understood. Once something is written, it no longer belongs entirely to its creator. Its meaning shifts, depending on who’s reading it and when.
That idea has stayed with me. I keep thinking about how it applies outside of literature, how often we try to control what things mean, to declare what a moment or feeling is supposed to signify. Maybe that’s why this strange heat unsettles me: The season is refusing interpretation. It’s October, but it feels like July. Usually by now the maples behind the library are brilliant red, but this year the drought has stripped them of that certainty. The leaves aren’t turning — they’re shriveling, brittle and brown before they ever get a chance to burn bright. They crumble straight to the ground, skipping the beauty they were meant to have. My body knows something’s off, but my mind keeps wanting to turn it into a metaphor.
Lately I’ve been trying to step back from that habit — to stop forcing meaning onto everything, to let life exist without so much narration. I told myself this was about learning detachment, about accepting that outcomes aren’t mine to control. It sounds balanced, almost mature. But the truth is that detachment, for me, quickly becomes apathy. The pendulum doesn’t stop at the center; it swings past. Once I stop caring about the outcome, it’s hard to care at all.
This apathy has felt strange next to the warmth. Everything around me is alive again: people reading on lawns, music leaking out of dorm windows, the late sunlight turning even the ugliest buildings forgiving. It’s the kind of weather that makes you want to believe in meaning. It invites interpretation — the cinematic kind of living where every glance or breeze feels symbolic.
I’ve always been guilty of romanticizing life, especially in the heat. It’s too easy to believe that a late walk home or a half-finished drink or the sound of a song through someone else’s speaker must mean something. Maybe that’s why the intentional fallacy struck me so deeply. If authors can’t control the meaning of their work, none of us can control the meaning of our lives either. Maybe we’re constantly misreading our own stories, projecting significance where there’s only weather.
Still, I don’t think that’s entirely bad. When I notice the light on someone’s face or the way wind moves through leaves, maybe I’m not romanticizing so much as paying attention. It’s not about inventing meaning, but about noticing it. Attention feels softer than control. It’s what’s left when you stop forcing the world to behave. The unseasonal heat has reminded me of that: the air does what it wants, indifferent to my plans, my deadlines or what month it’s supposed to be. I can interpret it however I want — climate change, nostalgia, a trick of light — but the weather keeps existing, whether I make sense of it or not.
It makes me think of all the planners I’ve abandoned over the years. Every September I start fresh, determined to get my life in order. And every October, the pages start to thin out. I lose track, forget to check boxes, stop pretending I can organize the future. The planners don’t end neatly; they just fade. I used to see that as a flaw, proof of my lack of discipline. But now I think it’s something else: It is evidence that life refuses to fit neatly into structure. Sometimes things just stop mid-sentence.
Maybe that’s the real reason this weather feels so emotional; it mirrors that in-between state. Not quite summer, not quite fall. Not lazy anymore, but not yet serious. A kind of suspended season where meaning feels possible but unfinished.
I’ve been trying to make peace with that uncertainty, to stop overexplaining my life to myself. Some days, detachment feels calm; other days, it feels like numbness. I think about what my professor said: Once a work exists, its meaning isn’t yours to control. Maybe the same is true for moments. Once they happen, they belong to whoever remembers them. And memory, like weather, is unreliable. It warms and fades as it pleases.
This week in Mirror, we linger in the in-between, the spaces between change and comfort, routine and reinvention. Two writers explore how house community pride shifts across class years. Another writer samples Hanover’s best pumpkin spice offerings. Our relationship columnists return to untangle the complexities of love in limbo.
So I’m trying not to force an ending on this season, Mirror. The heat will leave eventually. The air will cool. I’ll reach for sweaters again and stop mistaking sunlight for significance. My planner will fill up again, at least for a while. The sky will lose its soft confusion, and everything will start to make sense again in the way that winter does — too much order, too little light. Until then, I’m letting the warmth stay longer. I’m letting it refuse to mean just one thing.
Aditi Gupta ’27 is a Mirror editor from Ridgefield, Conn. She is majoring in Biology with minors in Global Health and English. On campus, she spends most of her time working in a cell biology lab. She hopes to pursue a career that integrates her love for scientific research with her broader academic interests in health and literature.
