Our eyes locked as we sat in silence, staring as the wind took the last leaves off the trees. Winter air hinted at its arrival, its cold fingers sending shivers down our necks.  

She broke the still air with excitement, reminiscing: The leaves are so much prettier in the spring.  

I responded without thinking: I have to disagree; the leaves are best in the fall.  

And when I asked her why, she said words so simple but harmful: Because everything is most beautiful when it’s first begun.  

I spoke hesitantly: The beauty in the fall is distinct. The leaves are golden and bright while living their last moments, knowing they’re ending in their brightest light. 

She glanced up at me then, like I had said something too close to both of us. The wind silently moved between our shoulders as if it was trying to keep us apart. 

I pierced the silence; my voice echoed through the air: Spring is an easy thing to love. Everything is alive and full because it hasn’t seen hurt yet. There are new blooms that do not know the weight of being held. There are branches that don’t know what it means to lose what they grew themselves. But fall—fall is an honest form. Fall is when the tree turns its pain into color, standing bare in front of itself, vibrant light illuminating the air as it’s giving its last breaths back to its own source of life. Fall is proof that endings can bleed bright, that a dying light makes the whole world stop and stare. 

She smiled at me a little; she laughed and covered her face. I knew she understood my words. How good she was at that. She picked a red leaf off the ground and twirled it between her fingers, testing whether dead things could still dance. A familiar glimmer lit under her eyes but faded as soon as it sparked. I just think beginnings are better, she said. They don’t ask anything from you. 

And I almost told her—the breath left my tongue, but sound did not escape—that was exactly why they scared me. Because beginnings are promises, promises that are made before anyone understands the cost. They are the hands reaching in the dark, promising, posing words built on air before learning all the ways a person can become an affliction without meaning to. 

No swallowed apologies. No names uttered differently after the love has changed shape. No silent car rides where both people know the argument is still sitting, breathing, in the back seat of both of their minds. No sleeping beside someone and still missing them like they moved away years ago, left alone by the person they love. 

She looked up at the tree again. The tree—it was nearly empty now. Only a few leaves held on, shaking in the wind like they were afraid of becoming part of the ground.  

I wanted to tell her I understood them. I was them.  

How sometimes love is just an excuse for two people clinging to the same branch, not because it still feels like a home but because falling feels like a final goodbye. How we label it loyalty when really it is just fear wearing a prettier word. How sometimes our warmth stays not because the tree is alive but because we remember it blooming. 

She said, Do you think the tree misses them? 

The leaves? 

Yeah. 

I watched one break loose and slowly tumble through the air like a thought that someone regretted saying. Someone close.  

I think it does, I said slowly. But I also think the tree knows it can’t hold everything forever and still survive the winter storm ahead. 

She got quiet after that. The kind of quiet that doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to say, but that everything left to say has teeth. I loved her most in silences like that. Not because they were peaceful, but because they were true. Because words always tried to dress us up as something we are not. But silence never lies. Silence sat between us with its hands folded, waiting slowly for one of us to admit we had been cold for a long, long time. 

She said, I don’t want to become fall. 

I said, You won’t. 

But I knew that was cruel because everyone falls eventually. Everyone loses their fainting green light. Everyone stands one day in front of someone they love with less to offer than they had at the beginning. Less mystery. Less ease. Less shine. More truth. More scars. More tiny fears that grew in the corners of their home where trust used to sleep soundly. 

I wanted to tell her that maybe love isn’t in the spring. Maybe love is not the first bloom, not the soft beginnings we take for granted, not the easy warmth of the first touch.  

Maybe love is in late October. Maybe love is choosing to stay when the colors change and fade away, when the air gets thin and frail and the days get suddenly shorter, and the person beside you is no longer the person your imagination first invented. Maybe love is learning how to look at bare branches and not call them “empty.”  

Maybe love is saying with understanding, I know what the seasons took from you, from us. Just because you are not covered in flowers, just because our eyes don’t spark as they did in spring, does not mean our life has ended. 

But I didn’t say that, because I was young enough then to think love should be said perfectly or not at all. So instead I watched her watch the leaves. And I wondered which one of us would fall first. 

I remember it clearly: Her head leaned against my shoulder. Her warmth was there, but dim. I could feel the future standing behind us, waiting, patient and terrible, holding all the words we were not brave enough to use. 

I could feel how love does not always break loudly. Sometimes it leaves us softly, one leaf at a time, until one day you look up and realize the tree has been bare for weeks.  

Still, for a moment, she was beside me. Still, her hair moved in the wind. Still, her hand was close enough that I could have reached for it. Still, the sky turned golden like it was trying to convince us that endings were not ugly. 

I said my last words softly, Maybe spring is beautiful because it begins. But fall is beautiful because it knows it’s ending and chooses to still continue on. 

She didn’t answer. She didn’t hesitate. She only opened her hand and let the red leaf go. We watched it lift in the air, then drop, then scrape across the sidewalk, until the wind carried it somewhere neither of us could see. 

And I thought, maybe that is what we were. Not the tree. Not the spring. Not even the fall. Just two people mistaking the same season for forever.  

Two people sitting beneath a half-empty sky, trying to decide whether love was the leaf or the letting go. 

And when the last leaf finally fell, she stood up first.  

I stayed there a little longer because some part of me still believed that if I watched the branches closely enough, the leaves might grow back before she walked away.