Dear fall,
I always say I can’t decide which season I love most, and then September hits, and you’re here, and I don’t have to wonder anymore.
I indeed love every season. I love summer—year round, I look forward to endless free days and perpetual sunshine—but it’s not the same.
I welcome vivid pastels and poetic clichés with open arms each April, but spring will never feel the same way you do.
In December, winter almost comes close to taking your place, snow wraps softly around tree branches and bundles me up with Christmas lights and evergreen trees, but then it’s January. It’s cold and the snow is gray and soggy and weighing me down, and I long for it to be October; I long to be with you again.
There is something devastatingly human in the act of loving you. The search for beauty until the end of life, the end of time. Finding everything poetic in the ordinary, squeezing every ounce of magnificence from what is, inherently, created to die.
In the eternal search for the meaning of life, humanity will always find death, and you will always be there with us.
I’ve never felt more human than I do while I write metaphors about leaves falling off a tree. I strive to create breathtaking alliterations about every vein in every leaf of every tree while they’re all slowly losing more and more life in the face of the impending frost.
I think that humans have already found the meaning of life. We found it when the first poem was written when the first painting was created, when the first book was dreamed of. We found it when someone looked at the dying leaves of fall and, in their desperate voyage for a will to live, decided it was beautiful.
I’ve loved the fall since my third-grade poetry unit when I realized that no one really had original thoughts about it.
My teacher writes about the crisp sound of the leaves and the vibrant colors and so do every single one of his 30 students.
Fall will always be every unoriginal thing I wrote then, and I love it because of that. I look out my window, watching as a leaf lazily sways to the earth, and suddenly I’m back in Mr. Greer’s classroom. There are messy poems scrawled across papers pinned up on the wall; they all read the same words.
Fall tastes like apple cider, fall sounds like leaves crunching under my feet, fall feels like a light wind stirring around me, fall smells like apple pie, fall looks like changing leaves and other clichés.
The love of fall is proof that humans can not only find the beauty in anything, but we can create it. We want to create it.
Humans will forever be unknowingly creating the meaning of life in the midst of their tragic search for it. Humans will forever find you lovely, and I will forever be in love with you.
Love always,
Evelyn
