3

autumn eventually took to sleeping in my bed with me, her skinny frame fisted up tight and hard against my side or the small of my back. sometimes i would wake up at her sighing, as if she were a million years old, worn out and sore, and even sleeping exhausted her. i would look over at her face, her features just barely visible, a muffled configuration of curves and concavities under the whitewash of the late-night moon and lamp light and see that

her forehead never completely smoothed. i would slide my hand across the sheet to touch her, run my fingertips over the furrows wishing i could draw her anxiety out through them, silently and desperately pleading with her mind to unknot, to please god let her rest,

she would sigh, her body a contracted jumble of angular joints and pale taut skin, her red hair framing and curtaining the lines of her skull, bleeding out across the linen. nearly every night this happened, i would reach out in the dark to touch her, hoping my presence would at last after so many failures be a comfort, wait for the tension to melt off like frost from a window, for her to clear,

nothing changed. my hands were small and powerless against her separation, every offering i made fell short in the face of the impenetrable barricade of her being.

i remind myself of this as the temperature drops and the branches begin to show, when i always demand of myself an explanation as to how i could not save her. i recall her as she slept, pressed into me, clenched into herself, and say we both did all that we were able.

and every year the leaves fall, and i wonder.

2

when we were first getting to know each other i would ask her about herself, you know, what her favorite things were. she would suck both her lips into her mouth, roll her eyes up, like she was thinking so amazingly hard. like she had never thought about it before. every answer started with "it's a tie between..." because she hated having favorites. and she said she was indecisive or pathologically eclectic, but i think it was just the way she loved, a million different things for a million different reasons. sometimes you crave chocolate and sometimes you crave curried vegetables, but if at each of those times that thing that you crave is what you want most in the world... that sort of logic. it was that once she loved something at all she never forgot, and love was an obligation to her, a vow, even when it came to inanimate objects, even when it came to ideas. to say it once meant ad infinitum. there were varying degrees of intensity, but the foundation was always the same.

anyway, i was saying, for a long time i felt like i wasn't going to know her. i didn't see how i could make any progress if she wasn't ever going to give me a straight answer. i think a lot of people made that mistake.

autumn had a boyfriend once, when she was five or six. from what i understood it was her only successful romance. it lasted for over a year, and then the boy was kept back in first grade. i guess you can only be so loyal to a girl you can't even count on seeing at recess. she said after that she went through a period of infatuation with gobo fraggle. gobo was an orange felt puppet on a children's t.v. show where he and other felt puppets lived underground beneath a man's house. he had purple hair. i know what you're thinking because i thought it too. i don't think it anymore, but this was in the beginning, remember.

she said it, and then she thought for a second. she didn't laugh like i'd expected her to. "it was kind of...i don't know. i knew he wasn't real, but i didn't? i think i knew it. maybe i had no idea. i had trouble with that, when i was small. there wasn't really a strong divide in my mind, between this world and other worlds, so a lot of the time my world was sort of, you know, in between? i had a whole mess of cartoon crushes. my very first, i was, like, two, it was speed racer. the original one, you know, that japanimation cartoon? i mean, i don't remember so much about him. but i remember when i was in love with peter pan, and i drew little hearts around all his pictures in this story book i had. and then lionel, from the thundercats. maybe a smurf. oh, and robin hood! the fox from the disney movie? i adored him. but when you're little, you know, and cartoons and talking animals and that stuff, it's what you see, and seven-year-old boys are, like, so useless, or at least they're pretty mean, i mean, what did i care if gobo was human or not? he seemed a lot nicer than any boy i knew. there was a hole in my bedroom floor, and i used to wish and wish that he would come up through it and take me with him. i would sit staring at it for hours."

she still hadn't laughed, and i had stopped being sure about whether i wanted her to. her forehead scrunched up the way it did when she was untangling a knot.

"fraggles were so tiny, though. i don't know how i thought i was going to fit through that hole. but if alice could manage it, right? i mean, those things work themselves out."

she wasn't even talking to me anymore. i never knew where she was when she got like that. she just went away. there was nothing in me capable of following her.

her favorite love scene: tie between the end of some fairy tale she'd read called "the light princess" and the final goodbye between christopher robin and winnie-the-pooh.

her favorite color: all of them, and especially green.

her favorite author: tie between lewis carroll and william faulkner. but her favorite books weren't written by them.

1

her hair was naturally red. i know that some version of the color, some segment of a wavelength from that spectrum, belonged to her. but there were shades within shades on top of shades, she was always changing, adding to, subtracting from, highlighting, subduing... in all our time i was never certain which of them was the truth, she moved and they shifted and tumbled all over her and each other like

leaves. it struck me all of a sudden, one day she was folded into herself on my sofa smoking a cigarette with her eyes half shut, a man's dress shirt, the cuffs unbuttoned and covering her hands up to the cuticles, extraordinarily faded and fraying blue jeans and her hair atypically and by chance down, three fingers of sunlight that had muscled through the drawn curtains woven into it it struck me

that she was autumn. utterly. that she had always been autumn, could have been nothing else. so i told her so. something went on behind her eyes, a rush of white noise, and then they closed completely, the left corner of her otherwise flat mouth lifting and collapsing in the same instant. and in that instant her body and everything in contact with it, the fabric upholstering the furniture, the air in the room, the smoke rising from her unashed cigarette and cocooning about her like a mentholated forcefield, her space

paused. she did not tell me then that what she thought was that autumn was tangible melancholy, the earth resigning itself to freeze and torpor and the loss of beauty, that it was the step between vibrance and dry catatonia, insinuating both but not wholly either or anything, that the season was the breath before death

she told me that when she was really little her family had nicknamed her fall for a cousin who couldn't pronounce her. she hauled herself farther into her torso, the smoke wall enclosed her gently, protectively

and i knew.