Autumn's fleeting friendship

Autumn is here now, gilded by it's sober amber, everywhere, which is curiously soothing. I feel I can confide in the Autumn, that it's soft-spoken and unassuming and a great listener. Autumn is gentle. It has to be. It mediates between choking summers and chilling winters. So it strolls with me in the middle-ground, contemplative and nodding, low moans and grunts to acknowledge my anguish. But we all know what Autumn really is. It's a short-term fix for a long-term problem. No matter. I'll still cling to it in a delusional postponement of reality, secretly imagining to myself that if I count every second as it slips away, I will have somehow stretched the time space continuum, making my adventure up and down its fluid slopes prolonged. But Autumn is a cheap anesthesia, and everyone imbibes from it's numbing toxin. Oh well. We sip tea and swill coffee, and we banter and wax philosophical. There's a mutual understanding, of considerable depth. Autumn knows me as a quasi-intellectual, something of a test-tube intellectual. A commendable effort, but incongruous and encumbered by stigma. I look a bit silly, and no less a dilettante when reposing on Autumn's shoulder, next to the symmetrical portrait of Autumn. And Autumn is a flawless thinker. Autumn's pragmatism is all earth-tones. It's beauty is understated, yet its wisdom is impeccable, and impenetrable. There are no holes in Autumn. And in this way, it is ruthless. The only love Autumn knows is the unrequited kind. Autumn uses us. It knows we will ache annually for its return. For our return to the introspection we've so desperately put off, like Spring's cleaning. Long ago Autumn learned all it could of us. It predicts us now, and prognosticates our pain. Autumn is a detached confidante, hard to invest absolute trust in because just as children are prone to Halloween's mischief, Autumn can not help but capitulate to Winter's domineering depression. But for now Autumn is still vaguely warm and cozy, and here.