an autumn day I must forget

Desolation.

The kind I bask in, strangely,
As I watch her shuffle purposefuly through the leaves.
Clad in black to mourn something she never wishes to know again-
Her own sorrow, that lover that has twined with her for so long.
I watch her, head high, shoulders straight, hair pinned up with a deliberate carelessness.
I watch, as the leaves crackle under the firm step of a girl whose foundations are shaken to the core.
Is she joyous? Does she rejoice?
Yes! Yes!
Her heart's warm place is filled with autumn light, filtered through the tired trees. I know from the way she walks, warm inside though the wind is sometimes on the colder side of cruel.

Does she feel sorrow, still?
Though confident in herself, in her image,
In her physical manifestations...
Yes. It's there.
The kind of melancholy
In which she loves, loves to...

...she is finding it hard to distinguish between the heady thump of distant music and the burning beat of her own heart.

So... what of desolation?
So she names her people, her poems,
But desolation cannot be his name.
Young, maybe delicate, almost graspable-
Not beautiful, surely. I can see it in the way she walks, filled with an unknown purpose. It is not beauty she seeks. You see, she is beautiful herself, but somehow this does not matter.
What is your own beauty when you seek something beyond beauty? It loses its potency, she knows.

Oh, the madness of her poem, which she scribbles in her head as her pace quickens.
Written after a year of absence from the pen, in the midst of satisfaction and happiness, and yet...

She cannot dismiss him as she does the others. Cannot maintain control with her usual weapons- sex and nonchalance. She cannot imagine being close with him. She doesn't know what it is that she yearns for.
All she knows is, his image fills her dreams and she cannot escape his surprisingly cacophonous presence. Drumming in her head.
She walks faster to the beat of the relentless drummers, leaves flying behind her.
Faster, faster, until even the wind flies by unnoticed.

I stop her with a hand on her shoulder, turn her around. She stares back at me with familiar eyes.

"Emily," I say, with great sincerity and a hint of tears. "I mourn for the words of love I will never speak."