I Remember the Beauty of the Falling Leaves

Story includes mentions of mental and physical abuse.

A butterfly whose wings sported the dance of emerald and lapis lazuli floated from the ground into the cyan sky until it didn’t. It fluttered in place, between the green of the grass and blue of the sky, split in two by the horizon. There it stood.

There are certain things in this world one can’t ever forget. Certain moments in our lives we never move past. There’s an afternoon like that for me. An afternoon whose image lingers in my mind despite the passage of time. A day that’s carved its way into my heart, marked by the conflict between beauty and regret.

I remember. It was a beautiful afternoon, perhaps one of the most beautiful afternoons I’ve come to witness. 

It was a day where I came back to a meadow.

We’d been to that meadow once, before. A long time ago. The first time. In spring. It was a very different visit, then.

The meadow was the same yet it looked completely different. In the place of dying amber leaves were fresh lime ones, in place of a handful of flowers was a parade swaying with the wind, and instead of… regret… there was something else.

Shortly after moving to our new city with Avaline, I’d gone on a weeklong search hiking in the woods looking for some beautiful vista I could take her. That’s when I found it. A meadow on a hill above the city. That very day I rushed back to her, left everything else behind and dashed our way back there. I wanted to leave an impression. I wanted to send a message. I wanted to make it clear that the life ahead of her would be nothing like the one before. That afternoon is another I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

I remember. The sun sunk from the sky ever so slowly towards the horizon. Freed from the bounds of any clouds, it spilled an aura of tangerine upon a sea of brown pine trees. 

“How close are we, J?” She managed to say through deep breaths and smile that had unwrapped itself of its lips.

“Close, real close. Hang in there.”

“C’mon, just tell me. Where are we going?”

“And spoil it? No way. Hang in there, we’re close.”

The way we approached the end of the upward climb hinted we were on the verge of the meadow. I stopped. With a smile that betrayed me wanting to appear stoic, I looked to my right into her eyes.

A swirling mix of amber on brown seemed to move around its small world. I felt like I could just get closer and peer within it and maybe see her soul resting in a different plain. It stunned me for a moment.

“Is this it, J?”

I twisted my head as if trying to free it from a string that pulled it towards her. “Umm… yeah. Yeah! Wait. Close your eyes. Let me take you up this final yard.”

Her palms flew up towards her eyes and covered it. I took my hands and wrapped them around her left arm. Just a handful of paces was all it took for the world around us to change. A handful of paces to leave the Earth and travel to a different planet where things were beautiful all the time and it was just me and her. I breathed in and soaked up the view a last time before I turned to her again.

“This is it.”

Her palms slowly left her face. Her eyes opened. I could see the meadow through them. That was the most beautiful moment I’ve ever seen. I photographed it in my mind and taped it to a part of my skull I couldn’t ever get away from. I don’t ever want to forget it. Eyes opened wide, her jaw opened, her neck swiveled across the field.

Her eyes shriveled into themselves. Her lips stitched close and pumped up. She looked back at me. I saw her eyes become more and more reflective until they rained. I took her in my arms. I wanted to say something fancy about how this symbolized a new life ahead of us but the words just wouldn’t sound right. So I told her through the wrapping of my arms, the leaning of my head, and the mixed warmth of the sun and touching skin. I think that was enough.

All I heard in return were sobs. Sobs that with time were paired with my own, as we embraced each other under the warmth of the sun, in our own world above the city.

We spent the rest of the day there. We talked looking down into the city. About the jobs I’d found and how she’d be able to paint from up here. Half of the reason I’d found the place was for that. She loved painting. I wanted her to have the most beautiful things to paint. Then we marched around when she suggested looking for insects. I didn’t love the idea, but seeing her scrummage through the hairs of grass for beetles and caterpillars with a childlike curiosity made me happy. Even if she threw a beetle on me for a laugh. Then we laid in beds of grass and flowers and stared into the sky. There we pointed at stars and talked about our dreams. After I made something up about a constellation, we talked about love and what it meant.

I went on a rant with spirited gesticulation about dedication. About being there, about taking punches for the other, about sacrificing, about doing unto them as was never done to you. In my sad and broken perception of love I thought it was about saving others from your own wails.

“I think it’s intimacy.” She said. “I think it’s having someone live in your own distant world with you. People are always so far, y-know? Stuck in their heads. So to have someone so close to you they can’t help but take in what spills from your heart… can’t help but understand you so fully, like you feel naked just by being around them. That just feels beautiful to me. Like something so beautiful it keeps you going, but maybe too beautiful. I thought it didn’t exist.” She stripped her eyes from the starlight and looked into mine. She didn’t have to say another word.

I remember. Behind the trees stood a wall of mountains that faded like an old painting in their distance. 

Then everything else happened. The truth is that Avaline came from a strange place. One of these strange and dark places so hard to understand. One of these places you could only ever tell apart if you were far from them. She came from a sick father. One that sent her to the bus to high school with a handful of bruises that traveled down her right arm. One whose graduation gift was the taking away of food and bed privileges. One that rubbed their sickness onto those they should love. I came to realize this a year after we’d met in sophomore year. And in truth, it felt personal. Seeing her scars felt like looking into my handheld mirror reflecting off my back. Seeing the excuses she made for them felt like hearing the blank doctrine I’d regurgitate to elementary school teachers. Seeing the silhouette of her father through the window of the bus on the way home made me see the beastly shadow of a man that once haunted me. That still haunts me. I saw too much of my life in hers. 

So I told her about my life. Told her about what I’d been through. I spoke the voice of reason I so desperately would have wanted to have heard some years ago. We spent a month looking at our lives. The sickness of the home. The coldness of the orphanage. So one day we couldn’t help it. We ran away. To some small city with a pretty meadow above it. I got there first to secure an apartment with some money from odd jobs. She came later with the little we had. And then everything else happened.

I remember. We were in our vast meadow surrounded by the trees, a sea of grass sprinkled by the occasional violet or orange or crimson flower and the dry brown leaf that made its way uninterrupted downhill and into the city. 

The beginning was absolutely beautiful. I felt things I could not comprehend. I felt, for once in my life, like the hole in me had been filled. For once in my life I felt whole. I’d see her smiling a lot. We were real happy then. But then everything else happened. 

Every day coming home at eleven in the night after leaving at six in the morning, I slowly came to see a belly grow. We’d gotten pregnant. It was a complicated to say the least. We didn’t have much money. We barely got by, ourselves. But still. As her stomach slowly grew over three months and we bought more and more bright toys and clothes, I couldn’t help but fall in love once more. I’d been given an opportunity. A chance to start anew and give onto this pure soul a love we’d not been given. So we treaded forward, put all doubt behind, and started picking names. And every day, after a handful of shifts around the city, I’d go back home and place my palm across her belly and feel a warmth and life I’d never felt before.

I’d go back to that warmth, that joy, that hope, every night. Sometimes as she slept in our small bed, sometimes when she’d just come home herself from work. Regardless, I’d place my hand across her stomach and feel a love of the future emanating from it. In my youth, nothing else mattered. We felt invincible, then.

I remember. We watched, with nothing but an unquantifiable distance between us and the world, the small and silent city under the sun.

That was until one day when we came back from a painting session in the meadow, a slender woman knocked on our door. It was her mother. She told Avaline her father was dead. Told her she wanted to talk. She wanted another chance. Avaline responded coldly and the woman left. Later, she came to me saying she considered giving her mother another chance. Asked if this was the right choice. I could feel a pain behind her voice. A fear.

Sickness like this does not go away easily. Your mother is as dangerous as your father. She’s a viper. Complicit, Projecting. Don’t let her crawl into your skin again. Stay here with me, please. I said nothing. The villain was the violence of her father, after all. They talked in a cafe, just the two of them.

The Avaline that came back was not the one who left. She told me she’d go with her to visit her family home, just to check up on old relatives and friends and talk with her mother. 

Your mother is as dangerous as your father. She’s a viper. Complicit, Projecting. Don’t let her crawl into your skin again. Stay here with me, please. I said nothing. She left. She went to check on her. And I was left alone. The first week was fine. I just had to keep busy with work. The second was torture, I was worried every second. Afraid she wouldn’t come back. I sent letters. There was no response. Then on the third, I began fearing for something else. I smelled a faint smell of doom.

I remember. For an afternoon, there was a planet with just me and Avaline. Although it felt like two different planets. There was a distance between us that could not be seen in the meadow.

Then in an autumn morning, she sent me a letter. She wanted to meet in the meadow. That’s when I made my trail there, and in the autumn afternoon sun, saw her standing on the hill. Far from me. She wore a thick sundress that flapped along with the wind. I felt the distance. It was like having a part of yourself dangled in front of you, forever out of your reach.

“J, you’re here.”

“Hey. Did I keep you waiting long?”

“You’re just in time. I just wanted to be here a bit longer so I came earlier.”

I treaded up the hill and met her at eye level. Our eyes swiveled past each other, afraid of meeting. We looked into the city.

I could hear the crying of birds echoing down from the trees.

“I was gonna bring the canvas and your materials and stuff. You never finished the painting.”

“No I never did, did I?”

“No. I was gonna bring it but the sun is already going down, so…”

“Yeah, this isn’t a good time for that. It is beautiful, though.” We looked around us at the trees and grass and flowers and the setting sun.

“It is. We should’ve come earlier. But at least we can see the sunset.”

“At least we can see the sunset.”

We stood yards a part, the sun between us, as the sky went from tangerine to red.

“So. How did it go?” I asked.

She looked down at her feet. They were covered by the sheets of grass. “Fine enough.”

The words were dry, cold. I wasn’t talking to Avaline.

“How have you been? How has our little champ been?”

The birds finished their songs.

There was a barrier that drowned out any emotion, any connection. I built up courage and looked at her. Nothing. Not a single bruise. Not a single scar. Her milky skin was as clear as the day she left. It was only paler.

“It’s been beautiful, hasn’t it?” She said. “We’ve had a beautiful time. It’s had it’s fair share of hardships, of course, but every tough choice does. We’ve had to work very hard, but I wouldn’t have traded this for anything.”

My breath turned shallow and frequent. I watched her closely.

“Eating out, dancing late, the music, the art. It was all wonderful.” She turned from the city and to the falling brown leaves from the trees behind. “And the meadow. Of course, the meadow. I’ll never forget the picnics, the painting, the looking up at the sky.” She watched as an ant made her way up and across her shoes. She chuckled. “I’ll never forget the day you first showed it to me.”

“Avaline.”

“You know I love you, don’t you, J?”

“Avaline, what did you do?”

She shuddered, fell to her knees and shriveled into herself, letting go of inhuman cries. My heart left my body.

I went to the floor and reached towards her. I tried prying her legs and chest apart. “Avaline. Let me see.” My eyes were empty and wide. My fingers trembled on trembling palms on trembling wrists.

I could feel my hand on her chest getting wet. “Let me see for the love of god let me see Avaline let me see please for the love of god.”

I stuck it further towards her stomach. There was nothing. Where there used to be something there was nothing. 

It was cold. It did not beat. Where there used to be something there was nothing.

I felt warmth leave my corpse and disappear. Somehow, nothing came to matter. It felt as if I had died. I was just a corpse drifting with the wind. I breathed, but I did not live.

I was a fool. I failed. She once told me love was intimacy. Understanding. Yet I knew nothing. In all our love, all our understanding, I never gave nuance to her life. I kept on projecting my history onto her. I never realized my greatest enemy wasn’t a fist. It was the sharpness of the sick tongue. The contagiousness of disease. Her sick mother was the worst of her parents. She turned her against herself. And no amount of strength could ever fight against that. The more you have the harder the punch you give yourself is. She convinced her of her being a burden. Of her killing me through overwork. Of us being young and stupid. Of our child being hungry and sick and poor and homeless. And soon she unleashed her against herself. And Avaline tore herself apart.

In my cold stare into the horizon, I made out the silhouette of a slender woman. She made her way towards the hill and stopped. She blended into the darkness of the sky. 

I remember. Then the sun finished setting, and there was only a semblance of violet left.

I saw what little there was left of Avaline slowly and mechanically get on her feet and begin walking away. 

Don’t let her crawl into your skin again. Stay here with me, please. I felt words stumble their way to my mouth. But they didn’t leave. 

I think my biggest mistake wasn’t how foolish and naïve and stubborn I was. It was that when it mattered most, I didn’t call to her. I couldn’t bear to pick up the pieces after the shadows turned us against ourselves.

Thinking of it now… we were 17. I knew nothing about children. I was stupid. But… to have them taken away… like this… from me…

Stay here with me, please. My tongue remained immobile as I watched the love of my life become a silhouette with the woman, and then disappear across the horizon. 

I remember. It was no longer a very beautiful afternoon. 

I noticed a butterfly whose wings sported the dance of emerald and lapis lazuli float from the ground into the dark sky until it didn’t. It fluttered in place, between the green of the grass and violet of the sky, split in two by the horizon. There it stood.