Autumn left me one fall. I haven’t seen her since.

It had been a tragic sort of relationship from the start — me and her. She would worry about how she looked, and I would worry about how people saw her. I’d tell her, “You know, you shouldn’t do that.” She’d wince, and shake the leaves out of her hair, snap back, “Fuck you sideways, you know. You know?” I preempted my vacuous lectures with “you know”. She probably hated that.

Which is not to say that she hated me. At least, I don’t think so. I was meek, then — “young, dumb and full of cum,” they might say. It certainly wasn’t semen I was worried about, or where to I might displace it, though hell if she ever gave half a damn about that. To Autumn, I may as well have been Winter. To that I stammered my feet, and bit my lip until the thin layer of outstretched skin lost its grip, and gave way to blood that tasted like it had been rusting inside of a soda can.

To be sure: she was gorgeous. And I don’t even think women are all that gorgeous. Once I understood that their skin is only softer than mine because of estrogen, the whole fantasy sort of collapsed around my feet like an over-sized, broken halo. Estrogen ain’t so great, I thought. But she would hate me for my testosterone — however little of it I possessed at the time — and I would end up loving her for the red in her eyes, and the hop in her walk. What a creature, she was. And anyway, I was a fool.

The flowers were preparing to hide beneath the earth to sleep for many months, and I prepared myself to be alive for those same months. How lucky they are — flowers and animals — to huddle up inside that which had birthed them, loved them, and let days become elastic weeks and then months, until waking life ceased to exist, and they weren’t around to let it bother them either way. Autumn would get frantic, tell me I was a fool for being unprepared. “We’ve still got fall,” I’d say. I didn’t see the point in doing anything else than what I’d already been doing. Winter would stalk the fields and distribute bleary blue nightmares, we’d put on heavy coats and let our eyes droop and darken just a little more, and that would be that. “And then what? Fucking fuck. I knew I couldn’t count on you.” She spoke in italics. I shrugged something blank.

August was fast-ending, and I would say good-bye to my least favorite month of the year. There it goes, another one. Good-bye, August. I’ll see you again next year, I’m sure.

She and I waved it away, and watched the world age, peppercorn-colored hairs on its head turning brown and red to gently fall out once Winter had his way. She grabbed me, on that last day in August, rattled my skeleton around like a Coke machine, and gave me an angry kiss, like it an were obligatory thing to do.

We had sex on the floor of her mother’s house on a carpet that resembled a toupee. I didn’t necessary want to do it. It was angry sex. Fierce, even. I felt removed from it, like watching myself be embalmed. It wasn’t the sort of sex people who love each other have. I’d watched the clock on the wall the whole time, and observed how the amber light that shone on that ancient carpet traced our movements and consumed us, became us. She slithered on top of me in a violent sort of way, and we fell into it.

Night reached out and grabbed me, and I let it. We walked where people had once walked, and she would say things, and occasionally I’d nod when she glanced over to see if I was listening to those things. Her eyes were dark and red, and she stomped her feet in a way that reminded me that she knew who she was — even if I didn’t — and I just sort of plodded along next to her, as if pulled by a supple, lazy rope. When her cigarette got too short, and there was no more pleasure — or perhaps sadness — to be gleaned from it, she would flick it away as though she had once loved it, but had suddenly ceased to. She would strike another, never offering me one, anticipating my stubbornness, reading the destitute eyes that sunk into my skull like marbles in a cup of yogurt.

“It’s getting cold, and I don’t know you. You just sort of walk along, head down, mind somewhere else and, Jesus, you’re looking old.”

“I’m sorry.”

We walked, she talked, and I looked up at dead stars that gave me their light long after death. I leaned over to kiss her head, though I’m not sure why. She let me — or, at least, she didn’t stop me. Her hair smelled like burnt leaves and fingernail polish. I kissed her above her right ear, the tepid strands touching my face like long, skinny fingers. It was something I had done many times, though now if felt like not much at all. Inside my stomach, an organ might have loosened and dropped into a pool of stomach acid. This was the same head, I had once loved. This is the same face, I had once kissed. Now it was head filled with smoke and maybe not much else. And anyway, who am I? I thought.

September and October were spent locked up inside my head. I emerged from my coma in the middle of November, like waking up inside of a glacier. Her hair had gotten longer, and her eyes were covered in a thin film of ashy mascara. She looked like a museum of someone that I used to love. Sun-blasted white, ribs like the inside of an oven — perhaps I was, too.

She got up from the bed suddenly, and smoked by the window. I hated it when she smoked in the house. The sun seemed to rotate around us for several hours, and left us in the bed we shared. The window, still open, had let in frosted air. The sheets were plastic graham crackers with which to tempt us with warmth. I tried to shut the window, but my bones protested, so the cold remained. Winter was approaching with more anger than I had recalled the year before. Bitter motherfucker, stomping into town and letting everyone know. He’d blow on the glass and cover the ground in volcanic ash. And every year, I’d feel a little less capable of loving another human being. Every year, I loved Autumn a little less. She leaned in to give me a meaningless peck, and I jerked away like a melancholic horse on reins.

“We should have been preparing, and now this. We could have been happier people sleeping some place warm. And now I can’t even get a kiss.”

“You know,” I started.

“I don’t want to,” she finished.

She put on a jacket, and walked out the door. I couldn’t follow her into what came next. Out the window, I watched as she stomped on white walkways, coughing steamy coughs, and disappeared into the gloom of the last day of November. I put on a sweater and fell into it.

“I fall . . .”

“I fall . . .”

“I bury them all.”

I laid down in a bed that was now simply my own, Winter battering at the windows, asking where she had gone. I pointed in the direction of her footsteps, and closed my eyes shut. I rolled onto the pillow beside me, and the smell of burnt leaves and fingernail polish met my nose. I wondered where she had gone of to, and closed the window. Summer skipped over the season that followed, gave himself to Winter, and Autumn walked alone in the snow, punctuating the air with corkscrew cigarette puffs, and wondering all at once what love even was, anyway.