The Autumn Door

It's always been your favourite time of year.

When the world rids itself of decadence and attrition. When modesty replaces overindulgence and the last wisps of summer sail away on a worn out wind. When change is inevitable and vibrancy replaces the monotony of green.

Humility always accompanies the falling of the leaves. It's smelt in the air, felt on the chill breeze that riddles one's skin with tempered solemnity. They trickle down, each one blessing the earth with touches of crisp memory and the promise of new beginnings waiting just around the bend. It's as if the world is sighing and nature can do nothing but respond: warm packs up for the winter and makes its way south with the arrows of geese; flowers fold back into the ground that retains them as a door folds back into its shimmed and squared frame; snow, though months away, pulses with an ever increasing imperviousness; green fades to orange and to almond, to gold and to crimson and to crème.

In summary, green fades.

“That's the last of it,” he says. Hesitation wears on his skin just below the brow, regret the frayed edges of a shirt run one too many times in the wash. He swallows something- perhaps pride, perhaps recognition of defeat- and fidgets with the mislabeled box in his hands. It's been used so many times it resembles more a soggy bit of cardboard than a device meant for carrying; duct tape cements its dilapidated corners into joints much as despondency cements his crestfallen lips to a frown. “I guess all that's left is good-bye.”

You stand with your emotions on a coat hook; nothing inside of you wants him to leave, yet everything begs you to push him out. It's always this way with you: love is a heart condition, treated by frigid doses of neglect and apathy, by the shutting of an autumn door. Best to sever the ties while they're barely binding, you've learned. Best not to get too attached before there's no pulling out and you're consumed by green. It always fades, after all.

Dusty oxfords leave a trail of footprints to the middle of the living room where he now stands, watching you with eyes that burn to the touch. The pants he purchased only a month ago are now baggy on him, they hang a bit too low on his hips the way a child hangs from a playground swing they're now too big to sit on; they try to fit, but gangly limbs drag on the ground and ruin the whole experience. Bone smiles through where the rim of his shirt meets his beltline; you wonder just when it was your selfishness stole away his appetite.

He was much younger before you got to him.

Sunnier, brighter.

Every taste of him was a fine wine your pallet was too unsophisticated to appreciate. Perfect, him- a little too perfect. He had a way of holding you that made you feel both beautiful and disgusted at the same time: beautiful that such perfection would regard you as worthy of his touch; disgusted that his beautiful touch made you feel so unworthy. You hid yourself from him for many nights, loving yet unloving the heated and chilled sensation his touch thrilled you with. In the end, he finally managed to make you need him more than anything you've ever needed in your faded life. His touch was essential.

You blink, holding on to the blurred incognizance behind your eyelids a moment too long. His memory fades.

“I still don't understand this,” he says, his rough fingers playing at a loose strand of the tape's sticky fiber. “I thought I made you happy. Why won't you tell me what went wrong?”

You explain why with a hollowed expression, all emotion wiped clean and wrung into an old, rusty bucket with a hole that leaks into the gritty clay of the back yard. This is the game you play; conversation might afford opportunity for reprieve. He has a habit of using your words to his advantage and if you're going to win this little game you mustn't allow him the slightest of openings.

“Always were bloody stubborn, you,” he says coyly. And he's hoping, you can tell, you'll take the bait. That you'll kick and scream and demand he re-nig his half-hearted insult and in effect prove that you're hurting as much as he is. That you're hurting, at all. He's looking for a sign of something, anything- an inkling that you don't really want him to go.

You, of course, parry his attempt with refrain.

Neglect is the fine layer of dust covering the mismatched furniture scattered indiscriminately about the room. Picture frames meant as a missed attempt at decoration play host to stock photos of the pleasant, carefree models they came equipped with at the store. Dispassion hangs limply from willowy curtains smelling faintly of the dog you once owned together. His name was Bucky, you think. The old grandfather clock ticks to five although it is now five twenty; the minute hand stopped working several weeks ago and though you're quite the tinkerer you can't seem to muster the will to set it on the right. A bit of you reflects in the cob-webbed mirror above the calico sofa and you catch the beginnings of a cringe before it breaks through your absent facade; you'd forgotten how much you can't stand the look of yourself.

Your face is a Rosetta, blank and meaningless as you were when the world slung you into it. Autumn hair hangs discordantly between a set of slated eyes rising barely above cheeks that hint neither at solemnity or sorrow. The vacancy, the lack of emotion, the small slit where an expression should have been- a smile, a frown, a mismatched jumble of the two- it's sad, pathetic. An ever present profession of lament. Even the cringe would suffice had he not been watching you with such method, such green.

“Are you going to say anything?” he asks. Red etches rejection on the rim of his eyes like a fine liner. “Or is this how you plan to let it all go? Can you honestly tell me this is how you want us to end?”

It's not that you don't want to speak, it's that you can't; you'd like more than anything to beg him to tell you it's a mistake- the hugest one you've ever made. You want him to drop that detestable box- the one that's taking him out of this place you've shared for such a long time, the one that abandon and misguidance and distraction have tempered you from caring for- and grab you and shake you and make you realize just how daft you're being, how he could never do something as unthinkable as allowing you to push him away.

But that's just you, mistakes. You make them the way the pretty girl in school makes friends and you discard them just as easily. He stands awkwardly with his dilapidated package by the old grandfather clock whose minute hand no longer works and drags his right foot back and forth against a nail sticking out of the old, plank board flooring. Arms thinned by turmoil wrap around themselves absentmindedly as your slated eyes trace the lines of the cork bookshelf you picked up at last summer's flea market. He was there, with you, that day, though he hates the market. He says it's the boiling point where ignorance and financial irresponsibility stew into something unthinkably asinine.

Yet in the end he gingerly pulled his wallet from the back right pocket of his jeans and paid for the shelf.

Emptiness distills the air between you and him; you consider what your next words will be as if they are a rook in a chess game- no other piece can offend with such an intricate pattern. You must choose its next move wisely. Your eyes run frantically around the many objects in the room like a mouse caught in a maze. They catch sight of a touch of reprieve clumsily hanging over the faded rocker beside you and you reach for it tentatively.

“Don't forget your scarf,” you manage dryly, emptiness dragging its muddy heels along each tactlessly uttered syllable; not the most memorable of farewells but they're the only words you can think of that won't make you choke on your own voice.

He watches you sullenly as you extend it toward him; slender fingers with nails painted Autumn surround the faded material as moss surrounds a dampened rock. You don't want the scarf. It's green, like him. You don't want the weight of it hanging from you like a coffer, but silly you- you cling to it the way a drowning rat clings to hope.

“Keep it,” says him.

A light wind scatters crispness across the open doorway, vibrant and modest. The autumn door creaks back and forth, unsure of which way to go. Willowy curtains, drunk with the old Labrador/Shepard mix, berate your nose, and your memory along with it. He waits for you to say something, but the vacancy of your expression- the place where a smile or a frown or even a mismatched jumble of the two should have been- says it all. His eyes find solace in the taped lid of a musty old box as rejection shuffles him out of the room without so much as a sigh.

You find yourself walking the footsteps he takes to the door, carefully placing your small feet in the dusty spaces his oxfords leave on the plank flooring. He doesn't look back. He makes his way out and the failing porch groans underneath the weight of him and the last of his things- a box of old records and magazines he doesn't even read or listen to, most likely left behind as an excuse to grant you an excuse to stop this mess.

But you don't, stop it; green enters the dented coupe parked disorderly at the far end of the cobbled driveway, and fades.

A squirrel scurries past your bare feet, its cheeks fat and happy with preparation for winter. Arrows of geese sing a scattered melody of the summer's close that echoes off of distanced hills slowly converting to brown. The yard is half alive with vibrancy and trickled blessings, the trees half dead with the year's final breaths. A somber breeze passes through the canopy of thinning oaks and maples as a train would pass through an abandoned station- just another anonymous stop that doesn't require slowing today. Flowers fall gently to sleep in their earthling bed, beneath a blanket of orange and almond, of gold and crimson and crème. An engine revs in the driveway, its tattered purr a cacophony of inevitability and mistake. The green of his eyes lingers on the faded porch swing as you push the autumn door to a close.

With a whispered click, it shuts.