I am writing to you in the time of falling leaves, the small golden ones which carpeted the path I walked on today towards the sun as it sank into the western horizon, making the light thick and amber like honey in a tilted glass. Those very specific leaves — I am writing to you in their name, may they bless my words and help me to choose the right ones.
I walk so that I can learn better how to see.
I walk the same paths and through the same places so that I can see things through all their seasons and so come to a better understanding of them. When I am walking, when I am seeing, I sometimes wonder if what I am doing is knowing. To know can also be to own, knowledge as something to possess, to capture, to conquer. I will open you so that all your secret parts are known to me and I will have knowledge of you. I have asked myself what is it that remains in the space that persists when the knowledge of a thing is extracted.
[There was always some part of me that I kept turned away, even when it seemed I showed everything. Sometimes I wonder, when you looked — what was it that you saw?]
One of the earliest things I can remember seeing were the leaves of late September and October, how their colours began to run from green though yellow and orange and red before dropping to the ground. As a child I thought, the leaves know that it is time for their dying and this was true, in a way. Now I think the tree is deciding what it can afford to keep and what it must lose, and it does this in the deepest of ways which transcends knowledge, and this is also true, in a way. But trees live through time as honey, sticky and amber, runs down a tilted glass. I know you know that time is different between us now.
Today it was thirty degrees, a glorious late summer’s day. It was the third day of October, it was beautiful, it was wrong and it was all of these things, and the little yellow leaves made a carpet that moved in hushed whispers under my feet as I walked. They whispered abscission, abscission under my feet as I walked, they rained down onto my head from branches like rice thrown at a wedding, congratulations, good luck — what do you know? It may not be enough.