A leaf fell from the tree I was never allowed to climb, the one that defines our front yard. He was dirt, crumbling around the edges. I imagined that his thoughts were hazy and parts of him just sort of fell away into nothingness. Behind me, the attached stop-sign slammed against the bus and bounced once, twice, against the side. The red lights circling that sign went out. I watched it drive away, and it was easy to imagine the circus in that big bumbling yellow thing. In another moment, it disappeared around the loop of the road, and then there was nothing keeping me from going inside.
I didn’t move, though. I stayed and smelled the grass and felt the air around me. The grass smelled like grass, not telling me what I would find inside.The air wasn’t thick or thin, wasn’t hot or cold. Occasionally, a mildly chilly fall wind would come, and the leaves littering the yard would stir but pass silently back into slumber. It was a quiet neighborhood and nobody cared that my backpack hit the ground as I stared at the bright blue door and the bright blue shutters, open wide and yet revealing nothing. My bag made an unsatisfying thump and then it was silent once more, but it was a bearable silence. Not everyone can understand that.
All over the gravel there were helicopter leaves the color of smashed peas, the color of the world in the summer. It was familiar. One was waiting patiently near my feet, and I picked it up, snapped in half, and released both pieces high above my head. The wind ignored one-- which fell into the grass, never to be heard from again-- but claimed the other, and suddenly the half-helicopter leaf was dancing and twirling above my head and back down to the earth again.
My neighbor’s dog barked at this, but I didn’t even look at him. I didn’t have any of the answers he wanted.
The leaf fell near a pile of its peers. I seized them all, breaking them in half, one by one. They were all just damp enough to feel of autumn. Some of the halves slipped through my fingers. It wasn’t important. There were still a bunch waiting in my hand and I couldn’t help myself; when the wind started I flung them all with a snap of my wrist as hard as I could, and the wind caught them all, and my hair, and we flew and flew and flew. And the half-helicopter leaves became a torrential downpour; became the autumn wind itself; became the shell that would protect me so I could go inside without the silence breaking my bones.