Autumn leaves

There’s only a crisp line of wind between me and her. She’s standing on her tip toes hoping that I’ll lean forward and close the gap between us. Her eyes are closed and mine aren’t. She opens her mouth ever so slightly but this only tells me one thing. I’m not ready. There’s that wisp of wind again. It doesn’t help me turn away. I kiss her anyway. What the hell, right? It’s not like I’m marrying her. It’s not like we’re going to go off and have kids and a house. Except we do. It’s all over now. That day, that wind, that autumn chill. None of it even so present as to prove that it was ever even real. How do I remember it so vividly and have nothing to show for it. Sure things happened afterwards but what of that moment when it was just two kids happily tumbling into something larger than themselves. What happened to those crunched leaves that we trampled? Are they dirt now? Mud? Have they been turned into a tree or burned? Have those moments flown up into the air and been inhaled by all those living creatures? What of all the other moments? They do, they go. Is there a machine somewhere that crunches them again and again, a little lady that writes them down in her book? Is there a future that they rush towards? Does the future rush towards those moments to meet them and once they pass they are forever changed? None of these questions have answers because the questions don’t make sense. What I know now is that moment is gone, and it might as well not ever have been real at all except that I remember it. And the moments fly away into the air to meet a future that doesn’t exist. The only thing that makes any shred of sense is what I do right now. She smiles, my eyes are still open. She says “That was nice,” and we walk through the leaves.