GOLDEN LOVE

I am a falling teardrop in the season of the ripe apples.

The ripe red apples roll across the yellow grass. Red leaves fall like rain from the sky. Orange chrysanthemums stare upwards, waiting for an autumn miracle. The sky absorbs the fiery red and reflects it into the water in the form of flames that swallow sadness. Melancholy hangs in the air and conquers our hearts.

You are a falling leaf. I am a falling raindrop. The wind introduced us to one another and made us a pair.

You fell with the crimson leaves like a cry for help. A help that I needed. A help that you needed. A delayed help. I met you when God had forgotten me, leaving me alone and without direction. When I met you, you too had lost your direction. But the rain, coloured by the autumn leaves, and the warm golden magic of autumn melancholy brought our paths together. The red apples rolled across the grass like temptation and late sin.

And we stood facing one another in the middle of the forest, sinking into gold and flames, not daring to come any closer.

We met before winter came to cover all the paths to human hearts with snow. Frightened by how quickly summer passes, we tried to hold on to it with the help of the falling golden rain.

I was not your spring. You were not my first love. Spring was the season of our quick and effortless loves. It is easy to love in spring. Spring love is light, airy, enchanting, colourful and effortless. It comes easily and is lived easily—with no dramas and no deep wounds. Nature itself delights in spring love.

Autumn love—as though everything is against it. As though everything within you and around you is unprepared for it. It arrives unexpectedly, and for a brief moment you burn with all the colours of autumn. Autumn love dissolves into the colours of autumn and departs with the last autumn leaves. And you circle through the air like an orphan, abandoned by the wind, because autumn love leaves behind a wound that is followed by the cold winter and the end of everything.

The red flames around us begin to fill the emptiness within us and warm our hearts. The emptiness that I hoped you would fill. The emptiness that you believed I could fill. After your first instinct to flee, you surrendered to the enchantment of autumn's gold and warmth. The warmth of the ripe red apples slowly filled your body, and you gave yourself over to temptation. The illusion that, through another person, you can reconnect with yourself and with God. A brief moment, granted to us by eternity, in which we remember the beginning of love. But autumn moves relentlessly onwards and steals from us the chance to witness the unfolding of our autumn love. That is why I will never be your winter. You will never belong in my snowy fairy tale. Our time exists only here and now—in this brief stolen moment hidden within the golden forest.

At the edge of the golden forest, our paths separate. Because the forest is only a stage, a road towards our tomorrow. Everything that has a beginning also has an end. A glass of red wine invites us to drink of Him and accept the inevitable that is coming. The vineyard, heavy with ripe grapes, reminds us of the pleasures and the sin of the body. Somewhere over there, where the intoxicated spirit rests in your arms. You, already drunk on the crimson wine, surrender yourself to the inevitable. Because the muddy puddles reflect the final crimson and golden leaves. And the rain mingles the wine with the water as proof of the divine miracles He created. As proof that after intoxication comes sobriety. After autumn comes the snowy winter. The pain born in the golden autumn will continue to live through the long, cold winter days and nights, reminding us of that brief happiness when I met you in the golden forest like a falling leaf. And you met me like a crimson raindrop.

To fall in love at the end of autumn, just before the harsh winter arrives, is like falling in love with your own executioner. Time is running out. The prayer has already been spoken. Time rushes forward too quickly. The executioner has prepared the guillotine. Upon the stage remain only the red apples, cut in half and rolling, a final invitation to temptation and sin.

I am a falling teardrop in the season of the ripe apples.

(Elena S. Lyubenova)