I

All of a sudden, things become autumnal. Things are amniotic, before. Things are warm and cosseted and sounds echo gently and reach your forming ears wetly and you react with unknowing idiocy. Tethering is all you know. If you had any more sense, you'd take it for granted but you're probably too stupid to do even that.

Autumn is not an end-state. It is a process. It is a narrative, a series of interconnected events.

Autumn is a story.

II

Americans call autumn fall because it is the time the leaves fall. And fallen leaves are the way you relate to this time of year, in your own tactile way. You've probably already thought about the sensation of crunching, dry organism under the heels of your shoes. But the fall is not the fallen. The fall begins with a prologue. A thin strip of tissue connecting you to a tree.

You are going gently into that cold night. But it isn't a snap and a bang. It is peril and fear and terror but there is probably time in there for love and hope and family.

The fall is life.

III

We don't romanticise the dead the way we romanticise autumn. Our paintings are paintings of creatures mid-fall, frozen in the air. The fall is too fast for us to consider any one moment particular eventful but perhaps temporarily like that is something we all decided to make up, together.

Maybe we're more obsessed with the end-state than any of us let on.

Is falling worth it?

IV

Some placentae are green, others are not.

Meander or hover after that. Get crunched. Get saved in some little kid's leaf-book. Maybe someone will take a picture of us.

Falling is worth it.

V

Falling hurts. Falling is dipping and weaving through the spaces between things and I make up horrible things to fill those spaces and I live my life an auteur. A creator-actor. I have to pretend the eldritch horrors I conjure up don't exist.

Giving and taking and losing and eking and looking at the dead leaves in front of you and the little spot where you'll land.

Is that a breeze?