I get like this every year, when the leaves fall. Maybe this year the fall won’t come, I say to myself. But sure enough, it comes. Drawn out summer or quick and hot, the leaves still fall.
I say, you don’t bother me leaves, I know your game. You fall, and you rot, and go away into nothing, all the while smelling so sweet.
I’ve always thought it strange, how sweet they smell as they lie there, rotting.
The rows of trees turn scarlet and tangerine, and they shed themselves like embers falling through the shutters of a fireplace, and I can’t bare to look, not for too long. Underneath children’s feet the dry leaves crumble, and they cry and laugh and how I wish they would all go home and stay inside, because it always makes me think of you.
We would walk together along the street, I would probably be saying some inane bullshit, and you, probably not paying attention, would nod or utter some noncommittal grunt. I didn’t ever mind that much, you were there with me all the same.
If we were lucky we might fall in sync, and look around, then you might say something we could feel at the same time, like “Isn’t it pretty here, when all the leaves begin to fall?” And we would stand together and watch them softly saunter down to land on the ground, in the dirt.
Now I tap the ashes from a cigarette and they fall down too, breaking on the bow of my windowsill. Then the broken flecks float across the sky and drift away to rest upon the street and the rotting leaves.
Maybe you were sat outside, on some quiet night, and I was stood a little way away. And after a minute or two had passed in the quiet, you would ask me if I needed the lighter again. Then I suppose I said yes, thanks, and returned the lighter, and to my mood, and the quiet.
And in amongst that unpresent flurry, the evening you didn’t come back. Distinctly, I recall in me the feeling of annoyance rise, which grew to anger and then dulled and softened to anxious blooms. And, when I found out you weren’t coming back I did nothing but watch the leaves on my own, because I could not.
Now there is no one but me to break the silence. So I wheeze and cough, and play the music that you probably wouldn’t like, because I can.
But, when the autumn comes around again, and I stare too long at the fluttering leaves, I hear you, your noncommittal grunts, feel your now-cold hands slip back into mine. And, if I hold my gaze just right, tilting my head a little, I can make out the arcs of your arm, drawn next to mine, spectral and thin. And, if by chance we’ve fallen in sync, I’ll hear you say something that we can feel together, like “Aren’t they pretty when they fall.”