11.01.2004 - 3:10 p.m.

So many leaves fell this weekend. They caught in my hair on the way out of work on Friday, yellow and fan-shaped, a nuisance that felt like my last straw.

They scattered, orange-brown, as I tore out of a driveway in the final throes of the anger I'd been trapped beneath all week.

They sprinkled like the last few grains in an hourglass as I spent an afternoon sanding metal: forty grit, fifty grit, sixty grit. I sanded until I turned brown, I tasted rust on every breath, but I found the silver lining.

They burned in the yard down the street, and I wished I knew how to fuel my own life in that way; a quick bright burst, then nothing left to hover but the sweet and spicy smoke.

-stonebridge

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