There was a spring when we mistook beginnings
for permanence.
The world, newly rehearsed in green,
seemed to agree with us—
as if leaves were promises
and every birdcall a signature
on something neither of us had read closely enough.
We spoke lightly then,
as if words were seeds
that could only grow upward,
never sideways into complication.
Even the rain felt gentle,
as though it had not yet decided
what it was allowed to become.
I remember how the air behaved—
not around us, but with us,
leaning in like a witness
that wanted to believe the story
before it had been told.
Summer arrived not as change,
but as confidence.
The days lengthened
until they seemed reluctant to end,
as if time itself
had fallen in love with its own continuity.
We learned the brightness too well.
We learned the heat
that makes certainty feel like truth
even when it is only intensity
wearing a convincing face.
Fields stood open like arguments
we were still too young to understand.
The sky stopped asking questions
and began assuming answers.
In that fullness
we forgot to notice
how quickly abundance becomes expectation.
Then came the turning—
not sudden, not cruel,
but inevitable in the way roots
eventually stop pretending
they are still growing upward.
Autumn did not arrive loudly.
It arrived with intelligence.
The air began to revise itself.
Leaves changed their language
without consulting the branches.
What had been green agreement
became negotiation in copper tones,
each tree surrendering differently,
each path remembering
it was always temporary.
We noticed small absences first—
a tone of voice less certain,
a pause where there used to be ease,
the way laughter no longer filled the space
it once expanded without effort.
We said it was only change.
We said change was natural.
We said many things
to avoid hearing the word ending
in its quieter forms.
And still, we walked together
through the falling of things
as if proximity alone
could slow decline.
Winter did not ask permission.
It arrived with clarity
that felt almost merciless in its honesty.
The world withdrew its excess—
color, softness, unnecessary noise—
until what remained
was structure, exposed.
Trees stood like thoughts
stripped of distraction.
Fields became arguments resolved
only by silence.
Between us, distance began to speak
in the grammar of frost.
What had once been effortless nearness
now required effort to imagine.
We learned the weight of space
not as absence,
but as presence that no longer pretended
to belong to us.
There were days
when even the sun seemed hesitant,
offering light without warmth,
as if it too had learned restraint
from watching everything else recede.
And yet, even winter is not final.
It only convinces us so.
Beneath the surface,
something waits—
not hope exactly,
but continuation
refusing to declare itself finished.
I saw it once
in the small insistence of thaw,
in the way ice loosens its certainty
without announcing forgiveness.
And I understood then
that seasons do not end relationships.
They reveal their nature.
We were not broken by cold,
nor saved by warmth.
We were simply measured
by changes we could not negotiate with.
Spring would come again elsewhere.
It always does.
But what we had become
would not return to its earlier shape.
And still, I think of us
as a year thinks of itself—
not as separate months,
but as one long motion
learning how to pass through its own weather.
