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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.