As I approach December.

This summer, Lucy, you became the color green. You were everywhere.Thousands of shades of you in each backdrop of my day. Greens which show in their most basic form the range of beauty from birth to death. Greens that no eyes rest upon for more than the time to sigh. Greens that vanish minutes after they begin, the shades in the deepest parts of the rainforest, transitioning from alive to something nourishing the smallest wonder of creation. I rubbed mossy reminders in my brick. I looked in rainbows and the long afternoon shadows for even the smallest hint of you edging into blues and greys.

Lucy, I have raked up oranges, yellows and red that used to stand like malachite statues to you. Autumn was always the time when I fell madly in love. I wished for a place in the world that was perpetually in a state of change, leaves turning, sky bluest of blues, football every Sunday and the air crisp as it hits the lungs during long early morning walks. When your color faded, love, I had no idea that winter solstice would settle into my heart so quickly. Purple again has cooled my soul. I cannot feel the weight of you in the dense humid air anymore. Green was heavy in my lungs this August, but now the thin cool air stings my lungs. I can only paint the sky green in made-up scenes of sarcastic contentment. 

Last year, when autumn changed to winter, I fell in love with you in the same breath that I began to miss you. Not even gravity can account for falling in love. I hit the ground in anguish and desperation. I wished to capture you in a vial, Lucy. Dab you into my neck each morning. Uncork you and take a bit of you into me again, filling me with a sense of innocence and awe again. You are like the willow, bendable and perfect, leaning over the water. I have made you into my lost youth. I have twisted you into my dreams. Autumn aches in me now, takes me on a journey I resist. I relive this landscape again, changing from possibility to tundra.

I thought of Eliot this morning. I argued. "No, December. Summer kept us warm, covering us in a forgetful green. But December, December is the cruelest month."