Falling Leaves

 The first few random leaves floated down, their yellow bodies gently touching the earth with the softness of feathers. These were the forerunners, the ones who would test the course before the racers came in ever increasing waves of aggression. Fall was falling. And there was no way to stop it's descent.

Summer had proved precious  respite. That season the one that separated us from the terrible reality of the moment. Those months where we had been compelled to learn a vocabulary filled with desperate words of pain and loss, of fear and uncertainty, of numbers upon numbers. Our eyes studied graphs and charts as we attempted with small success to separate fact from something far less. Gravity pulling us down a dark hole.

Summer was the antidote to all that poison. We were allowed the freedom of deep breaths here, moments where we might be untethered from haunting thoughts, where our feet could transport our mind to places far removed from the images that forever crowded our brain. 

I wonder what concerns the leaves have as they begin their fall from the limbs that housed them. Are they worried about the end of their existence? Do they mourn impending demise? Do they ache for friends and family? Or do they just reach for the ground and eventually disintegrate, as if they had never even been? Without a trace.

Maybe they are nothing more than they appear, without the benefit, or curse, of thought. Like the questions begging response these harrowing days, I cannot begin to fathom the correct answers. If they even exist.

When this all began these leaves, the ones now under contemplation, had not even come into being. Winter was still upon us, with all its grays, everything muted, color in full hibernation. The trees in stark display, skeletons completely exposed. It was near the end of their barren season.

And as we were to discover, the beginning of our own.  

The existence of these leaves as the only real definition of ephemeral. Like the summer itself, as we tried to lose ourselves in the moment, the moment was no more

This morning's rain seems to have accelerated the destiny of the doomed. The ground no longer merely sprinkled with fallen reminders of the recent past, but in some instances wholly blanketed. It was as a mirror of the disease that had overtaken us. First slowly, then all at once. 

And it is not merely yellows that have surrendered but browns and oranges. No longer just an occasional branch that has given up the mirage of comfort, but some trees in full flight. Neighborhoods blighted. And it spares not those who rested on high, for all are equally subject to the ravages of an enemy they cannot see or turn back.

I miss the summer more than any I have previously known. 

The leaves are falling.