Autumn Leaves

Thou knowest love, I know that thou dost know

That I am here more near to thee to be,

And knowest that I know thou knowest me:

What means it then that we are sundered so?"

-Michelangelo

Autumn Leaves, Prologue:

The night has become unerringly silent.

It is perhaps this silence which told him that it has come back once again to his abode. But perhaps not. Perhaps it is something else, a hidden consciousness buried deep in his being that illuminates, like a lamp, the faint but glowing certainty that it would appear again tonight. Perhaps it is this meek indubitable knowing that makes the night ever more soundless to one whose vow is never to listen to that silence again.

His wife sleeps beside him in picturesque softness, breathing in the air around their bedroom to exhale a safety net of fragrance and warmth. He looks at her in this silence; tenderness in very the throw of her limbs; her slumber has always served to be his security.

For she slumbers in the arms of angels, he is certain. He could see it in the feather-soft curve of her lips, smell it in the air of baby powder and rose.

He often told her it was akin to sleeping beside an angel.

But he, he is as mortal as a man. He ages even with the best of them; his bones lamenting the passing of warmer seasons onto cold, and no magic can heat up the ice in his veins when fear presses her shuddering breath close to his for a kiss.

Because he knows that kiss.

He never remembers until it happens, yet he would recognize its taste of frozen amber and ash. His heart would give a single beat that seems so surely to be his last, and for one second he remembers everything, everything.

The red and gold seasons streak before him, rustling through the chambers in his head.

Dancing their scarlet ballets.

Then he would know, with a certainty that would shake his heartbeats back into an awful rhythm, that it has come.

The duvet covers peel under his hands, under his grasp the door opens and softly shuts behind him, and an angel slumbers on unawakened in Paradise.

Walking in the darkness to the baby room, he realises that tonight the floorboards are exceptionally icy beneath his feet. He wished he remembered his slippers, the comfortable terry material on which his wife had lovingly sewed pretty beribboned flowers. No matter where he was, he always sees the signs of her presence in his life, the way she surrounds him in her love. Sweet messages of prayer on the insides of his robes. Frames-full of pressed flowers from early courting days, breaking up the straight contours of their corridors. Jars of preserves lining the shelves, dutifully handed out at the office.

Somehow tonight, all of these signs had dissolved into the stillness, swallowed up by the long shadows dividing the life he was living and the life that he had, as if it was nature's decree to keep things clean when retracing the passage of time.

Tonight, the present melts away and he is naked, as he somehow finds himself every time he meets his past.

Pausing in front of the doorknob, his breath exhales upon the motionless, heavy air. He listens unwillingly to the silence beating in his veins, trembling under a shudder that did not quite come through his skin.

Should he say a prayer? Call upon the love of Christ?

Would He answer? Or Him?

The stillness becomes oppressive, chill sucking up the soles of his feet, and he becomes ever more conscious of his inevitable judgment. Again he trembles, from the inside, where he feels the coldest.

Her love, he suddenly realise. All the sweetness of her love, he could gather them around him tonight, and they would be his heavenly shield.

He would banish this haunting past, once and for all. He has the strength to do this, he says to himself fiercely. He is the one who lives.

Boy, nay, man-who-lived.

His cold finger push opens the door. It swings open to the slightest touch, almost alive in the easy expectancy of its sway. The room is alive; the wind had settled in them and he feels the softly blowing breeze, listens to the rustling blinders.

His eyes falls with immediate and unerring accuracy upon the sleeping face of his son, undisturbed by all the violation of his space. The night-light he had installed by the crib seems to display rather than dispel the darkness.

An illumination much stronger than it should be hallows the silent child in the throes of his dreams, turning the silent sleeping face into a tiny moon which glows like a beacon through the darkness. For one moment he thinks that he is mistaken, and almost chides the paranoid misgivings which had lead him to his son's room tonight.

Then he sees them, the autumn leaves, and suddenly the room is filled with the richness of reds and gold. They hover in the chilly air, eerily unmoving despite the stirring winds; their virulent colours are like blood drops in his landscape of shadows and moonlight.

And once more he swoops upon the cradle and scoops up his son, throwing his wild green eyes around him, and his feet remembers their habitual movement of backing away from this awful fear.

"Stop haunting us!"

Is that his voice? It seems to have come from another autumn in his past; travelling long distances across space and time so by the time the words are heard, the indomitable value of the message was already dead, and it becomes little more than an echo.

There is a short silence of floating fall leaves, and he waits, clutching the precious burden to his breast.

Then it finally reveals itself, a familiar form gathered from shadows. He sees its slight frame, unaltered through the years; in its clear face a smile, sadder still than his imagination could ever have made it to be.

"It is you that haunts me," the Ghost told him again, and it quietly slips away, leaving a faintly residual glow which might have been a trick of his eyes.

The autumn leaves rustle once and melts away into the silence. The wintry cold releases its grip upon the room, and stillness reigns again. The only movement left is Harry's own breathing, exhaling harsh vapours upon the suddenly still air, tightly cradling the sleeping child to his nearly bursting chest.

Every autumn, he feels like he could almost cry.

***

"I know it and I weep, too late made wise"

-Michelangelo

***