Fall🍂

It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain. To let it be, to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do.
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Photo by Elijah M. Henderson on Unsplash

It was a journey similar to the one a leaf undertook in its departure from the tree, that sheltered it all these years. Like the autumn season could symbolize new beginnings, this journey was the start of a novel story. A new beginning, birthed as the past shed its deceptive visions that penetrated, through the kaleidoscope of the moment, one so desperately strived to make the most of. A story that was yet to be written in the pages of time.

Have you ever wondered what goes through a leaf’s mind as it drifts towards the ground only to hit rock bottom? How it feels lost as everything around sheds what differences they had, for once and for all? As the world takes on a different dimension? What it, thinks as the visiting breeze carries it off to an unknown destination? The prevailing sense of mystery was similar to the anxiety one held for their future.

It’s funny how the season is termed ‘fall’ overlooking the rising, that would follow shortly after the fall. Not everyone chooses to remain on the ground, after all.

Photo by Jara on Pexels.com

Autumn is the hardest season. The leaves are all falling, and they’re falling like they’re falling in love with the ground.
― Andrea Gibson

Time proceeded on his beautifully merciless path as always, a new page being added to the story with every turn taken, while elsewhere, a family of three mourned the loss of their only child. Like a feather, did the soul, leave its physical self to embark on an ethereal adventure. Only this time, there was no bottom for it to crash and no breeze to carry it along. Is it true that death is the beginning of a new life? Or is it freeing of a soul from its earthly obligations?

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
–Robert Frost

Akin to the leaf’s fall coinciding with both the the start and end of two stories, would the start always provide a glimpse of the end? Why is it that there are constantly more questions than answers? Or are the questions answers in themselves?

Why is it that the journey matters more than the destination? When one undertook the journey to get to that destination in the first place? Funny, isn’t it? When one is told to make the most of life when there are ideas, thoughts and questions that you don’t know how to phrase yet. And right when you’ve found, the right variables to put in that one equation that has been persistent in causing your foundations to come tumbling down; a lifetime is suddenly, hardly any time at all.

Photo by Daniel Frank on Unsplash

Does a leaf have to go through so much internal conflict to rise again? Or could all of it be an illusion waiting to be uncovered and exposed? But are we truly fated to dwell in this state of perplexing love for life, enslaved to mysteries birthed in thoughts?

I am the master of my fate,
 I am the captain of my soul.
–Walt Whitman, Invictus