October 2022

October 2022

The girl thinks everything changes but me. She sat at the desk, looking out my third window, cautioning me to tell you that. Tell them about the loss, the change, the can’t stop, won’t stop tumble of everything but you. Me.

I believe the girl forgets, sometimes, who is writing these letters.

The girl can’t look over shoulders I don't have though. It’s hard to make sense of a body that is three rooms of brick walls stacked, and some bees under a cracked tin tile on the roof.

She says I haven’t changed, but she wasn’t watching, was she? Distracted by the girl and her wolf. Sent walking by the girls that followed. Gone for days on end, when I stood, like any decent audience to watch the ancient, aging, mountain blush like a school girl. Thank sky some two in love came to visit while the girl was gone, thank earth they used the oven, made soup, swept the floor. Thank Fall for the lovers viewing autumn from the dutch door, both domestic and romantically. Thank it all, my girl came home to me alone and promised we would also be the same.

But I have changed. Who couldn’t? We all do with the first frost. That first breath. The memory of what’s coming waking up to the cold air. Still alive. Ready to take over, take notes for those who will hibernate through the worst of it. The reckoners. The record keepers. The watches and watchers. Marking each bird that doesn’t come back to roost. Talking with each leaf—who have decided spontaneously, individually, and all at once—to go brilliantly. Without grace. With a show. Just because I don’t have lungs, doesn’t mean I haven’t waited for it, with something like my hair down, and the candles lit, and the moonlight through an open window.

I’ve changed. I’ve watched the trees go up leaf by leaf in something like a fire, to a place that has never caught fire. The timber remembers, if you ask it softly, lips on the hardwood, about the time when it was a forest. That fire was faster, it will tell you, but this fire, the one they call October, it’s just as lovely, and only hurts half as much.

I changed. Remember? We pulled the plants in from the porch. And laughed at the squirrel so ready for winter, he almost couldn’t make it back up the tree. And you tried to catch my laugh like a spinning seed from the sugar maple.

I change seasons like the girl changes outfits. Bracing against the familiar while confronting the unsure. Peeling back a layer at a time. Until, like a calendar near its thinning end, there’s no more left to take off. Time collapses, but we’re still standing. Our hands searching for a seam: paint peeling in patches from the wall, skin cracking and flaking with gentle dissociation. Both of us, bare, and unsure how to keep warm until the sun comes back.

I have changed. And she stayed the same. Left the same. Came back the same. I will try to hold still for her now. While she runs to catch up. While she stops to hold her breath. While she sleeps beside her mother for the first time since she was a child and, like a coward, does not ask to be held.

I’ll pass your goodbyes on to the dogwood,

the apple house