Autumn Leaves (Part 1)
A COLD GUSH OF WIND passes through my bare legs, sending a cold shiver from my foot to the very ends of my jet black curls. The leaves rustle in harmony with the river as it crashes onto stable boulders and stationary boats. Around me, the trees are tainted with a beautiful sunset colour-the brightest out of all the autumns that I’ve ever seen.
[Continue]
Leaves wait there on their branches, clinging on with their last remaining strength before they unlatch themselves from the one thing that they have been doing-from what they have been used to doing. In a few more days, once bright and lovely patches of green will lay dead on the floor, stepped on, thrown away and forgotten.
They are born for the grant of others. They live in service of everyone. But they die as nothing but something to be burnt into ashes.
How can someone live with such a fate? Oh wait, they’re not humans. I forgot. They don’t feel. Poke them they won’t cry. Tickle them they don’t giggle. Love them they won’t love you back.
I wonder if they’d love to feel human even just for one day. Where they’ll have their own feet to travel the pavements that they used to only stare at, to have fingers for entwining rather than clinging, to speak, to laugh, to draw-everything!
That must feel magical.
I would know the feeling.
I was a leaf once.
Until I saw, from behind the shadows of the setting sun and under the shade of the wilting tree, eyes. They stared back at me with wonderment. Skin pale and white reflected the orange sun and his noticeable curved down lips were open in surprise.
In that awkward situation, we stood in unnoticeable silence because inside, something was beating to life. From being an inanimate object, something had begun to finally live after all this time of rebirth, repair, and relapse.
I didn’t even know we went to the same university. The school ground was too large of a land area for me to cover with my slim ballerina feet. But I do recognize that shade of hair. Under the gleaming light of the afternoon sun, it would shine above everything else. Brown with a hint of orange, from afar it looked like sunset. And from afar I watched.
Min Seok was unreservedly kind to everyone he met. For a Junior, he was quite popular with the freshmen-even me. I never even saw him with the same person twice. Except of course for his occasional travel buddy named Lu Han, a Chinese exchange student, Min Seok would usually be around different groups of people every day. Given that fact, I still couldn’t muster the courage to talk to him. From afar was nice.
“What are you gawking at?” Ji Yu inquires. I quickly avert my eyes in hopes that she didn’t notice.
But it was no use to try and hide anything from a person you’ve been with since day one. “Again? Didn’t you say you “moved on”?” she motions quotation signs in the air.
“I have. I did,” I mumble in my defence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about”
She shrugs her shoulder and ignores me instead. Ji Yu knows that I like it better that way. There was no use in talking to me; I say that both to others and to myself. It’s hard to end something you’ve started and have eagerly continued with zero resent. It gets even harder to quit when the distance that has kept on growing between us for the past few months shrinks into a suffocating expanse of his company and his company alone.
[Continue]
Leaves wait there on their branches, clinging on with their last remaining strength before they unlatch themselves from the one thing that they have been doing-from what they have been used to doing. In a few more days, once bright and lovely patches of green will lay dead on the floor, stepped on, thrown away and forgotten.
They are born for the grant of others. They live in service of everyone. But they die as nothing but something to be burnt into ashes.
How can someone live with such a fate? Oh wait, they’re not humans. I forgot. They don’t feel. Poke them they won’t cry. Tickle them they don’t giggle. Love them they won’t love you back.
I wonder if they’d love to feel human even just for one day. Where they’ll have their own feet to travel the pavements that they used to only stare at, to have fingers for entwining rather than clinging, to speak, to laugh, to draw-everything!
That must feel magical.
I would know the feeling.
I was a leaf once.
Until I saw, from behind the shadows of the setting sun and under the shade of the wilting tree, eyes. They stared back at me with wonderment. Skin pale and white reflected the orange sun and his noticeable curved down lips were open in surprise.
In that awkward situation, we stood in unnoticeable silence because inside, something was beating to life. From being an inanimate object, something had begun to finally live after all this time of rebirth, repair, and relapse.
I didn’t even know we went to the same university. The school ground was too large of a land area for me to cover with my slim ballerina feet. But I do recognize that shade of hair. Under the gleaming light of the afternoon sun, it would shine above everything else. Brown with a hint of orange, from afar it looked like sunset. And from afar I watched.
Min Seok was unreservedly kind to everyone he met. For a Junior, he was quite popular with the freshmen-even me. I never even saw him with the same person twice. Except of course for his occasional travel buddy named Lu Han, a Chinese exchange student, Min Seok would usually be around different groups of people every day. Given that fact, I still couldn’t muster the courage to talk to him. From afar was nice.
“What are you gawking at?” Ji Yu inquires. I quickly avert my eyes in hopes that she didn’t notice.
But it was no use to try and hide anything from a person you’ve been with since day one. “Again? Didn’t you say you “moved on”?” she motions quotation signs in the air.
“I have. I did,” I mumble in my defence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about”
She shrugs her shoulder and ignores me instead. Ji Yu knows that I like it better that way. There was no use in talking to me; I say that both to others and to myself. It’s hard to end something you’ve started and have eagerly continued with zero resent. It gets even harder to quit when the distance that has kept on growing between us for the past few months shrinks into a suffocating expanse of his company and his company alone.