There are berries on the honeysuckle now, which sounds like the opening line to a very earnest novel written by a woman who owns several linen dresses and has recently moved to Provence. Unfortunately, it is just me, sitting in my garden in Newcastle eating lunch with two cats nearby and thinking far too deeply about a plant.
It is the first day of October and, rather inconveniently for the seasonal narrative, it is beautiful outside. Properly beautiful. Blue sky, sunshine, the sort of weather that makes you briefly forget that we are hurtling towards the bit of the year where it is dark at approximately 2.45pm and everyone starts talking about putting the big light on.
So I took my lunch outside.
The cats were doing their usual garden admin. Charlie was inspecting something near the fence, Angus was probably considering a crime, and Maggie was somewhere being Maggie. I sat down, looked across the garden, and noticed the honeysuckle.
And that was when my brain decided we were going to have "A Moment".
Back in spring, I spent a lot of time sitting in this garden waiting for the honeysuckle to flower. I noticed the buds appearing, then the first flowers, then more of them. At roughly the same time, something else in my life was beginning too. There were messages to wait for, plans being made, all that lovely early-stage possibility where absolutely everything feels significant because somebody has used punctuation in a way you find emotionally compelling.
Spring is very good at beginnings. Everything is showing off.
October is less bothered.
The flowers have gone now. In their place are berries. Some of the leaves are beginning to turn and the whole garden is quietly starting its annual decline into what I like to call “absolutely not my problem until March”.
And yet, sitting there today, I realised I did not feel sad.
That surprised me slightly because I have spent a frankly unreasonable amount of this year being capable of extracting emotional symbolism from almost anything. Songs. Perfume. Train stations. Scottish geography. Probably a receipt at some point. I have been one minor weather event away from writing a 2,000-word essay entitled What Drizzle Taught Me About Love.
But the honeysuckle did not make me sad.
It just made me think.
There is something odd about returning to the same place after your life has changed. The physical setting is familiar, but you are not quite the same person sitting in it. It is like visiting an old hotel room, except the hotel room is your garden and you are eating something from the fridge while a cat stares at you as though you personally invented disappointment.
I remembered sitting there months earlier, when everything felt new. And now here I was again, only the season had changed, the flowers had become berries and my life looked different.
Not worse. Just different.
I think we are terribly bad at that distinction.
We tend to treat endings as failures, particularly when it comes to relationships. If something does not last forever, there is an instinct to rewrite it. Perhaps it was wrong all along. Perhaps we should never have done it. Perhaps the entire thing was a terrible mistake and we must now burn the metaphorical photographs and emerge with a podcast.
I do not really believe that.
Some things can be good and still end.
Some people can be important and not be permanent.
Some versions of our lives can be completely real, even if we only get to inhabit them for a while.
The honeysuckle has not somehow betrayed me because it stopped flowering. I am not standing over it demanding to know why it could not maintain the same level of emotional availability it demonstrated in May. It did what honeysuckle does. It flowered. It changed. Now it has berries.
Nature is extremely relaxed about transition. Humans, meanwhile, are sending six-minute voice notes.
Maybe that is why I liked sitting there today.
Nothing needed fixing. Nothing needed explaining. There was no great revelation where I suddenly understood every decision I have ever made and became a spiritually evolved person who now owns matching ceramic bowls.
I simply noticed that something had changed and the beauty had not disappeared with it.
The garden was still lovely.
The sun was still warm.
The cats were still wandering around.
Lunch still tasted like lunch.
And my life was still here.
I think that is the bit we sometimes miss when we are trying very hard to “move on”. We imagine there is supposed to be a clean break between the person we were then and the person we are now. A point where we stop remembering. Stop caring. Stop associating things with a particular time. As though healing is some sort of emotional factory reset.
I do not want that.
I do not want to erase whole periods of my life simply because they ended.
I would rather let them become part of the landscape.
Something happened here. It mattered to me. It changed me in some ways. And now other things are happening.
That feels much healthier than pretending none of it existed.
It also feels much less exhausting.
There is only so long one woman can make everything about a relationship before even she starts thinking, Christ alive, can we discuss literally anything else?
Which is perhaps the real reason I liked the honeysuckle today.
It did not feel like a symbol of heartbreak.
It just felt like October.
A different season.
A different version of the garden.
A different version of me sitting in it.
There are berries on the honeysuckle now.
And honestly, they are rather beautiful.
