Most people I know tell me that fall is their favourite season. This year I became curious about why. Is it the air? The colour? The smell? It’s all of it, of course–but I think deep down the real reason so many of us love fall is that it is when everything begins to die. We feel it. We know the end is coming. Time becomes palpable–it accelerates, even–and we try to savour every moment as it runs between our finger. We love the fall so much because we appreciate things most when they end. This feels deeply interesting and important to me.
So I turned it into a poem.
Here is the instagram version:
The full text has another stanza. It reads:
You think the reason
You think the reason
You love fall is
Crisp air
Red trees
Falling leaves
Mulled wine in your mouth and
Frost making the grass crunch under your feet
But the real reason you love fall is that
Fall is when time slips between your fingers
And you realize it’s too fast,
faster than your forgetting
Humans don’t know how to let go
Fall is a laser that
snaps you to attention:
look and
look now before it’s too late
Skin alive
Hungry eyes
Heaving breath
Suspended before the end
Everything becoming precious
Wow the leaves they are so beautiful tonight