Leaves in their Graves

– There’s a crunching, like the solitary sound of a gazelle making its way through a meadow at midnight, as I cross the lawn. The dead leaves of fall fill the empty dirt spaces, a battlefield of winter. I am the giant. I am like god. I look under foot and see the fractured bits of leaves in their different colors. I shiver as I reach the driveway. There are no leaves on the car or under it, as if this were a sacred space. I open the door and leave behind the battlefield, the leaves’ and my own. I drive away from the big house. I almost hear a familiar sigh. I know it is only the movement of the wind, as I move away through the space and through time. The drizzle returns. It is a constant in the winter months. It is the guest you thought left but creeps out from one room or another, or suddenly comes down the stairs having lost herself for hours on one thing or another in the upstairs spaces. The drizzle makes its way around the frozen branches of the trees along the drive. Sometimes it is simply their shiver. the trees’ slight reverberation in the breeze that creates it, but more often, it is the drizzle itself still hanging about. I turn on the windshield wipers. They begin their rhythmic collisions to and fro, as they wipe away rain drops. The sky darkens with the dampness. The dead leaves seem to resuscitate with the movement through time and space, even as it is weighed down by moisture.
Everything becomes muted, the colors outside the window lose their hue, the headlights and the rhythmic collisions of the wipers are all that remain, as I drive to the small book store. There’s a man who will be making origami shadows. He has a new book. I need a new reason to leave the house these days. I drive. The wipers whiplash against the windshield. The headlights momentarily trap the somersaulting leaves caught in the wind. I think about how she could be anywhere, about how she could be a shadow of memory, about how nothing makes much sense anymore. The house is empty as I drive, yet it is no emptier than it’s been since she lost that initial enchantment. The drive is covered in shadows. The shadows of the clouds, of the leaves, the trees, the droplets-as they fall, and every other form which mitigates the moon’s light. I start to imagine the folds necessary to create from one thing another. The way a flat sheet of colored paper can become a swan, a bird, or some other small life form. I start to imagine the way God must’ve taken small sheets of clay and through successive folds created each living life form. I wonder if this man, at the book store knows the special folds that God used. Then I’m blinded by headlights. I snap out of thought.