Autumn leaves

Some meetings feel like memory before they even become one.

Covington "Covi" Terrell has built a life that looks right from the outside - a rising career in architecture, a tidy apartment with an alphabetized record collection, Sunday mornings at church, Wednesday calls to his mother. He has learned to call this *fine*. He has never asked himself if fine is the same thing as whole.

Then autumn comes, and with it, a stranger on a stump in Caldwell Green - a worn paperback open on his knee, one earbud trailing Sam Cooke into the falling leaves.

Robin Christopher is twenty-two, guarded, warm underneath it, and living back in his parents' house while he pieces together what's left after a season that nearly undid him. He isn't looking for anyone to save him. He's just trying to remember what quiet feels like.

Neither of them means for it to become anything. They just keep finding each other - on Thursday trails and record store afternoons, at dance halls that smell like the sixties and taste like right now, in letters written by hand because some things deserve more than a screen. They talk about loneliness, and family, and the God they've both quietly wondered about - *does He really see me?* - and somewhere in all that talking, in all that dancing, something neither of them planned begins to take root.

What starts as friendship becomes devotion. What starts as devotion becomes a love so consuming it frightens them both - tender, unhurried, and then suddenly not unhurried at all.

*Autumn Leaves* is a story about two men who spent years wondering if they were enough, told through falling leaves, soul records, slow dances, and the particular ache of finally being known. It is a love story in the old sense - patient, poetic, physical, sacred - about learning that being chosen by someone is beautiful, but being chosen by God is the ground everything else gets to grow from.

Some leaves fall because something is ending.

Others fall because it's finally time to land.