|
The first leaf flutters to my feet.
The final curtain.
Indian summer is a possibility but never the same.
Not with the angle of the sun making shadows a little longer.
Not with the trees displaying last ditch rainbows before lapsing into winter
long comas.
Not with magical love affairs that took up in May and ended precisely at the
fall of the first turning leaf.
True summer is gone.
Funny how the onset of spring develops laboriously, like pregnant women awaiting
the ninth month, wearing boots of slushy snow and a coats of dismal gray.
Winter retreats, reluctantly, and Spring creeps in on tiptoe, legs wobbling.
But summer flees, as if racing from the heat of the sun itself, on Icarus wings
of melting wax.
Fall turns up the thermostat in August, only adding heat to paraffin plunder
and, inevitably, I am left floundering, desperate at the thought of enduring
another ice age.
Nine long months devoid of blooming flowers, songbirds and him.
Alone.
It helps to kick the first fallen leaf, let it know whose boss.
Stomp it into the ground with the heel of a boot and twist.
The leaf deserves it for being weak, for allowing something as worthless as
winter to come between it and its destiny.
It should be ashamed of itself.
Even as I hear the footsteps crunching on gravel behind me, I deny them.
Not this time.
Not this fall.
He'll turn me around, push back my hair and tuck it behind my ears as he's
always done.
He'll place a finger under my chin and tilt my face to meet his, as he's always
done.
But this time he won't say it's all for the best.
He won't say that he wishes it could be otherwise.
He'll say it's going to be different.
And I'll learn to love fall.
He doesn't and I don't.
He does turn me, he does place a finger under my chin and tilt my face to meet
his, and he does say words.
But not the right ones.
He walks away.
I walk away.
And all that is left is a dying leaf, entombed in a muddy grave.
|
