/---/
Autumn. You brought me into this world.
Autumn. Why didn't you let me be?
Autumn. She whispered in my ear.
A-u-t-u-m-n.
You merely wanted her. She was practically a goddess.
Autumn. This world feels like a fantasy.
Autumn. Please, let me join you.
Autumn.
A-u-t-u-m-n.
Words flew by.
"I am Autumn."
She was the whisper of leaves in the wind. The amber's glow of fading daylight. The crisp promise of change in the air. Every smooth step she decided to take painted the world in shades of gold and crimson, a memorial dance between life and decay. She didn't merely belong to you, nor anyone; she belonged to the earth and the sky. To the fleeting moments of in-betweens summer's warmth and winter's chill. To want her in the mortal coil of yours was to desire something eternal, yet as fleeting as wind creating a way for rain, something that was beyond your mere mortal grasp.
"I hate the way I am."
A gentle reminder of who she was.
You merely wanted her, but she was more than a season—she was the embodiment of transition. The bittersweet beauty of endings and beginnings, a chill running down your spine, or leaves that rotted. To hold her would be to hold the very essence of time itself. Her presence was a reminder that nothing lasts forever, that life is a series of moments, each one more precious because it is fleeting.
"Will you save yourself from death?"
She woke you up in this magic.
And in her eyes, you saw the reflection of a thousand sunsets. Each one was more beautiful than the last, each one a reminder of the impermanence of all things. She was the promised twilight hour, the gentle sigh of the world as it prepared to sleep. The soft, inevitable march toward winter.
"Beware Winter because she will not be so kind to warn."
You were ready to fall into insanity.
But even as she faded, slipping through your fingers like the leaves that fell from her branches, she decidedly left a mark on your soul—a lingering touch of warmth, a quiet subtle ache, a sudden memory of beauty too profound to forget. She was the autumn of your life, a season that would return again and again, each time leaving you breathless, longing, and forever changed.
"I love people like me."
You were a toxic person.
She was Autumn, and you were merely a passerby in her eternal dance of sleeplessness.
/---/
Where are you?
You were drowning in some sort of liquid. Your lungs burst as you coughed. You weakly tried to make out your surroundings.
What-
is-
this?
You lay there in a pool of blood. It felt like your own. Eyes bruised blue and violet with bones broken and unmoving. You felt like you remembered this place as your safe place. A place like dreams while you lay in the puddle of your own redness.
You started laughing in pain.
It leaked from your stomach.
The pain was unbearable.
Where was she?
The hill of dark green with the scenery of a small town in the distance...
It was your own blood...
The memories flooded your nervous system as you gurgled on your spit.
She left you for dead.
The ground beneath you was cold and unforgiving, the dirt in your fingers was stuck as you tried to move yourself. It was as if the earth itself rejected your presence. The world around you was blurred, the small edges of reality you could decipher were fraying like the tattered remnants of a long-forgotten nightmare. Shadows in the back of your eyes flickered in the corners of your vision, whispering secrets of forgotten pain and lost memories.
You slowly crawled around- trying to find anything to hold on or use with your limited senses.
It felt like a burning pain in your chest...
It was a place both familiar and foreign. Twisted reflections of something you once knew—perhaps in another life, another time.
The taste of your iron made you swallow as your hands reached a tree branch.
A word in your head.
Fuck.
There was something else on your hand and it didn't smell too good. You wanted to fucking throw up.
You gritted your teeth as you used the branch to carry yourself on your broken body.
FUCK.
The air was thick with the scent of iron and decay. Your dying senses were on high alert as you tried to leave this place as soon as possible running to this imaginary town. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. You panted as your mangled mind dealt with the ghostly echoes of your heartbeat that were slow and fading. Each pulse seemed to carry you further away from the present, drawing you deeper into the abyss of your own mind.
Fuck.
You couldn't see yourself anymore.
Your branch got stuck and you were thrown to the ground.
A deep breath of yours as you tried again.
You tried to move, but your body refused to obey, every nerve screaming in silent agony. The weight of the world pressed down on you, crushing you into the cold, hard ground. Yet, amid the pain and the darkness, there was a strange sense of clarity, as if the blood pooling around you was not a symbol of your end, but a gateway to something beyond.
Your running thoughts were.
Survive. Survive. Survive.
What, are you blind?
You struggled to get up but eventually you did. You huffed in a weakened state.
Something bad happened to you.
You remembered this place, or at least the feeling it evoked—a sense of being caught between worlds, suspended in the twilight between life and death.
The first dream of her.
She sat there lonely beside that tree you finally rested your back on.
Now you were in the same place but all alone.
It was a realm where time seemed to stand still, where the boundaries between dreams and reality blurred, leaving you lost in the labyrinth of your mind.
It's probably karma.
As you lay there, helpless and broken, you wondered if this was how it was always meant to be—if this place, this dreamscape of blood and shadows, was the true reflection of your soul. Perhaps, in some twisted way, you had always been destined to return here, to this place that felt like a forgotten memory, a fragment of a dream you could never fully grasp.
This place...
And as your vision dimmed, the world fading into darkness, you realized that this place, this dreamlike hell, was not just a reflection of your pain—it was like a dampened mirror of the choices you had made. The odd paths you had walked, and the life you had lived. It felt like it was the final chapter of your life.
Is this what Autumn promised you?