"Hello," I said, and I was happy to see him.

The wind gusted. Leaves whirled and pirouetted;

their rustling telling summer tales of campfires

and hiking and breezy summer days where

nothing happens except that you are alive.

The world was a festival.

The sun waned and the leaves were

thunderclaps.

that swirled in autumnal waves; crackling salvos.

I stepped on a leaf.

It was like a butterfly crushed,

smashed colors, like a shattered church window.

I wanted to grab onto the world, stop it,

and send it coursing back through time.



He smiled, his hair blew back.

I miss you, I wanted to say,

do you miss me?

But his thoughts were unintelligible ciphers,

and a wall of birds was erected between us.

The day was gray, cinereous.

I felt out of place, out of time,

a fragment of someone else's sad dreams.

I didn't want to see him, I realized,

I wanted to remember him as he was.

I wanted to converse with memories.

I wanted to swim

in an isolated sea south of the equator.

I wanted to catch fireflies and skipstones.

And I was mad at him because summer was over

and I did not live here anymore

and I never would again.

My thoughts were dolphins in the moonlight,

midnight lightning cracking and crashing

in the distance.



Later, I returned to my old house

and went into the woods nearby.

Slivers of cold assaulted me,

and my breath was a phantom of the dusk.

It was a pumpkin day.

I went to the rock.

I saw the vines.

I saw the caves.

I saw the boards,

and I sat on them.

They were still comfortable.

We used to play here and talk here,

though I did come here just myself,

to think.

And as I was thinking, a dead leaf

brushed my cheek, the fingers of a corpse.