They tell me the season hasn't changed. That it's still autumn.
And yet, everything feels different.
Painfully so.
On the mornings I have a little extra time, I drink my coffee outside, just as I did in October. And I look up at the trees, up at the sky that once seemed to radiate anticipation and excitement, and listen to the wind that once seemed to whisper the secrets of a thousand ghosts; carry the voices of hundreds of pumpkins from miles around as their candles illuminated their mouths, and I see nothing but death and desolation.
I watch the leaves fall, brown and brittle. They remind me of dry, cracked skin in winter, ready to split open and bleed...bleed out the last of autumn, only their blood is invisible. Colorless, like November itself.
I watch a sad group of leaves scatter about, scurrying like the family members that stayed too long at the party and now politely being shooed away. I notice one of them hitting newly every branch on the way down, as if trying to cling on. Trying to give autumn just one more shallow breath of life.
It's heartbreaking, and brings to mind a childhood memory. I was seven, and trying to shovel some small remnants of snow onto the hill next to my home, so that I could keep sleigh riding even though spring was in the air.
Is there ever enough time in a season?
Everything melts, and falls, and breaks...
I go for a walk, and find it remarkable in the worst way how you'd never Halloween was just two weeks ago. The remnants are gone, hidden away as if some terrible evil would befall us all if they stuck around even a moment past midnight on November 1st. The rotting pumpkins are scarce this year. Perhaps they are tired...tired of being forgotten. Tired of smiling in a world that forsakes them in a month's time.
It's hard to exist in a world that only accepts you temporarily.
And is there anything more temporary than autumn? The season where everything is dying at a rapid pace in front of your very eyes?
Yet only some of us ever seem to attend the funeral.
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