The Secrets to New York

Three | Autumn Leaves

The way the leaves fall has always made me feel kind of hopeless. But you loved it.

I remember the first time you tried to explain it to me. (They’re not falling because they gave up and died, Emery, they’re falling because they are giving way to the new and that is something beautiful).

I don’t remember saying anything to argue with you; I guess that’s just because you made me look at it with a new perspective. You made me look at a lot of things with a new perspective. But that’s gone now, just like you, and now when I see the leaves beginning to fall in October I get that same feeling of hopelessness that had consumed me before you did.

I would go to the park at the same time every day and just wait: fifteen minutes past three. I would wait for that familiar scent of your cologne to appear behind me (you always smelled warm; like a favorite blanket that anyone would love to snuggle up into), and find its way to the seat next to me, always curious about what I was reading that day. It started off that way--two people longing to more about each other. Soon enough the days turned into weeks; weeks that we would sit on that bench in the park and just talk about anything.

You wanted to be a writer.

I still didn’t know what I wanted to be.

That’s okay you assured me one day, picking a red leaf off the ground and twirling it gently between your fingers. Nobody really knows what they want to be, it’s all a game of chance.

I don’t know why that sentence filled me with so much hope; I guess maybe it was because meeting you was a game of chance, and I was pretty sure I won that one.