October and the nostalgia of falling for you

it will always make me think of you.

i fell for you then,

when the world was shifting

into a place i remembered

in my younger years.

the maple trees

wearing vermilion cardigans,

the oaks sheathed in dying hazel,

the dusk unraveling

its amber braids.

i recall the weather.

the chill beneath the pewter sky,

a twinge of petrichor in the pavement,

your fragrant hair threading through the crisp air.

the murmuration of leaves

scurrying across the sidewalk,

acorns scattered around our cars

in every parking lot,

playground swings

suspended in their autumn stillness.

because of you

october had always felt less like a month

than a place i could return to.

i picture joy,

a life before worry.

rain-soaked coats.

muddy paths.

my mother's voice calling me

inside for dinner.

a place where childhood wasn't something

i knew i would lose.

then there was you.

standing beneath the autumn trees,

with the wind making a beautiful mess of your hair.

personifying chaos

in your delicate manner.

you gave me a peculiar familiarity

before i had the right

to feel i knew you.

i remember how easily our conversations wandered.

from the insignificant

to the intimate,

from the lives we were living

to the children we once were.

you told me one halloween

you dressed as a bushel of grapes.

i hid my heart surrendering

behind laughter

and told you i had once

gone trick-or-treating

dressed as a crayon.

there we were,

brought together by fate,

two grown people

standing in the cold,

reintroducing each other to

children neither of us

would ever get to meet.

on many occasions,

i've tried to imagine you then.

a little girl

beneath the october moon,

wearing a ridiculously adorable

concoction of purple balloons,

reaching out your tiny hands

for candy at the doors of strangers.

i wondered

whether the girl you had been

would have liked the boy i was.

how i would have been

too timorous then

to tell you that i liked you.

whether somewhere,

in some impossible rewriting

of our pasts,

we might have passed each other

on a leafy sidewalk,

you in your grapes,

me in my crayon,

too young and pure to understand

that one day

we would have so much

to tell each other.

there is a certain sorrow

in meeting someone late.

you begin to grieve

the thousands of ordinary

moments you might have shared.

scraped knees.

the photographs.

long drives home from places

we never wanted to leave.

i wanted to know every version of you.

the grape-version of you.

the teenager who mistook her first affection

as forever.

the woman you are now

who learned which parts of herself

the world could be trusted with.

i remember wanting

more than anything

to be there for all the versions

still to come.

how strange it was

to spend so many years

learning to live without expectation,

only for a girl

in the middle of october

to make the future feel inhabitable again.

how one day

we would carve pumpkins

and laugh at their expressions.

how you'd decorate our home

before the month began.

until i met you,

i never understood how hope

could look like nostalgia,

how in less than a month

of knowing you,

i wanted to grow old with you.

the feeling of holding your hand

for the first time,

the russet leaves,

the smell of smoke,

marigolds, and cosmos.

i remember the warmth of it

beneath the cold,

and looking forward

to all the octobers we had yet to live.

now i spend them

remembering the only one

we ever shared.