And Autumn found herself dropped like a hot sheet of cookies. He didn’t call, he didn’t text, he unfollowed her on Instagram. It was worse than being dumped: he discarded her. He ghosted her. He was gone.
The weeks bled on. The world went on without them. The bus lines into town went on strike. Nani took a fall that landed her in the hospital overnight. (Then she had vodka smuggled into her room and got drunk.) A cold spell weakened the roses in Summer’s front yard, which terrified Autumn, because Summer had planted them with her very hands, and more of the proof of her life was being erased by the day. Summer faded to winter, as it always does. And Autumn was still in love with a ghost.
Why would he not call? All she’d wanted was a little fight, a little drama. She had no idea it would actually end everything. She felt like pleading temporary insanity and getting that day of her life expunged from her record, but she couldn’t. All she was doing was pushing him away to protect herself, and all it’d done was make him walk. She had never known a loss like this – not since Summer, at least. Soon she started dressing like such a slob that her workout clothes became her normal clothes, and then her normal clothes became her pajamas. She was lost.
Every time she heard their song, some stupid poppy thing from the radio, she fell back into the summer, back into Hank’s beetle-black eyes. He’d hated the song, actually, and for some reason she’d always laughed at his disgust. And these are the things that join us: you learn about someone and get to know about what they hate and what they love and what makes them tick and what they never got to do. Little tendrils that grow into another person, bonding you. You are family, and wrenching yourself apart is the worst thing in the world.
All around there was some sense that time was rushing at Autumn, sifting down through the sand dunes, hitting her little house and flying by, surpassing her, leaving her behind, separating her from those few glorious months when she never had to look down, when she knew her place. Sometimes she almost wished she could go back and unmeet him, make him mean nothing to her again, because never having him at all would’ve been easier than losing him like this. And the thought of him moving on with someone new, kissing someone new, fucking someone new, made her absolutely want to vomit. It was like when her grandma had tried to force her into giving her favorite doll to a girl down the street, the one that peed its diaper and cried this annoying high-pitched wail. Instead of letting the girl have it, though, she threw it in a lake. If Autumn didn’t get to enjoy Hank, why should anyone else get him? She couldn’t believe he was living a separate life in the same town, just blocks away. She missed the time when every love song she heard wasn’t about him, when she could look out at the sea and not see him staring back at her, feel his arm on her shoulder, taste that tangy salty taste of what came from him. So she turned to donuts and cats for support. Lots and lots of donuts and cats.
She couldn’t believe her luck; she wanted to curse herself for hating everyone who loved her. And as the weeks went on and he didn’t call, she grew to resent him. She wished she could be a boy just for a moment, so she could plant love in someone and then walk away from it. How would that feel, huh, Hank? To take a girl who had folded into herself as protection from the cruel world, make her rise out of herself, and then step away, leaving her all exposed all over again?
This wasn’t the plan. Forever was their plan. They were meant to be together. She felt it as surely as she felt Summer in her soul, filtering down, remaining. She just didn’t know what to do about it. Because just as you cannot go home again, you cannot return to that comfortable dazzling pocket of first love. You can return to an ex, sure, but those early breathless days when your world lit up with midday sunlight and you knew exactly where you stood in the world and the future was a thing to look forward to again? You could not ever go back to that, not really, and Autumn knew it. And so the fear that it would be different, dulled, muted, kept her from contacting him.
So Autumn gave up. She lived, as she was accustomed, in the cocoon of isolation she had created for herself. She went to work. She shopped. She thought of Summer every single day. And she kept herself as far away from love as she could.
Soon she was no longer the carefree girl of the summer. She grew dark and grumpy and increasingly pudgy, no matter how hard she tried to hide it with drapey black dresses. Her mortality was flying at her. Girls were getting engaged left and right, giving up on the dating life and throwing themselves into that bottomless pit of doom known as marriage. The children across the street were growing older. Autumn was getting older, too. She found two grey hairs one morning in her bathroom before work – not one, but two. Two! And it broke her soul to imagine growing any older without him. She wanted time to stop, at least until she could join him again. Memories were being made without him, and the gulf between them was growing. This thing was relentless. Did he feel the same, though? Was he mourning them just as much as she was? She didn’t know, and it tortured her.
At night she tried to escape into her books, flee into the fantasy worlds they offered. Usually she devoted her time to the Bravo network and Perez Hilton, but books were Autumn’s one concession to intellectuality – nothing thrilled her like discovering a new set of words that had never been arranged before, stumbling upon a little turn of phrase that made her look at something like she never had, having someone describe a very specific emotion that she’d felt herself but had never been able to put into words. Because there was no app for the feeling of falling into a series of pages and never wanting to come out; no Buzzfeed listicle that could give you the comfort of knowing book lovers never went to bed alone. Books would never gain an eye for blondes and walk out on you. Autumn lived for the moment when she would pick up a book and think, “yes, this, THIS is the world I’ve been waiting for – I would give my left ear to step into this place and live there forever.” The book that made your whole world seem lacking. The book that made you want to track down its author on social media and annoy the hell out of them even if it made you look like a stalker, and then congratulate their parents on giving birth to them. The book that was so good it made you set aside a weekend to just get lost in it; the book that jumped out at you and simply made you want to live a better life and be a better human; the book that landed uncomfortably close to a basic human truth you didn’t want to admit to yourself and made you sputter and re-read an entire paragraph. The one that made you say, “Yes, this is a thing that is true, a thing that has never been said before, not like this.” Books were friends. Books were there for you. Books were love, forever.
Autumn tried to read, but in the darkness, when she closed her eyes and tried to drift away, she could not escape the spirits of him. After all, she’d run away from her grief into Hank’s eyes, and now she had nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. What stood out to her now, now that it was unquestionably over, were the little things, the moments of small comfortable love. Because we remember moments, not days. So she forgot about all the grand declarations and the fancy dates and she just saw the tiny snapshots. She saw him holding her hand in the car as she drove in the rain at dusk, she felt his warmth in bed as they slept on a Sunday morning, she smelled his soapy, citrus-y scent, she felt his tears on her neck as he laid his head on her and cried about his time at war and of Summer being a memory now. She was grieving for the second time in one year. She was so sick of the grief. When would the happiness come? When would she start feeling again?
One day during a rare cool snap, something strange happened: Autumn’s phone rang. Ariana from work, who had not been fired but had been sent to another satellite office across town, invited Autumn out with some random girls around Thanksgiving break. She reluctantly agreed, desperate to get out of her house and escape her own mind. Very early on, though, it became clear that Autumn was not yet ready to be out in public. She downed shot after shot, and although she knew she should stop, she couldn’t bring herself to. She simply could not stop drinking about Hank.
“That’s awesome!” Autumn said after a brunette shared her plans to honeymoon in Key West. “So, tell me: has your fiancé broken your heart yet, or are you still hopelessly lost in La La Land about the inevitable futility of love?”
An awkward silence fell over the table. A sweet little blonde beside Ariana cleared her throat and tried to break through it. “Hey, um, do you guys know what I’ve been thinking about lately?”
“Lesbianism?” Autumn asked, sipping her Blue Moon. “Lumberjacking? Because with those denim overalls, I’m guessing it’s one of the two.”
The blonde smiled, terror glossing over her blue eyes. “Um, no, I was going to say I was considering those environmentally-friendly bamboo wedding invitations, but those work, too!”
“Autumn,” Ariana hissed ten minutes later, pulling her to the side after Autumn had openly laughed at another girl’s engagement ring. “Tone down the weird Debbie Downer stuff, will you?”
“What do you mean? I was just trying to be friendly.”
“Friendly? Please. Why did you have to tell that girl that her boyfriend looked like a koala bear on meth? That was beyond awkward.”
“Just calling it like I saw it,” she hiccupped. “All the wedding talk is getting old. Let’s talk about NASCAR.”
“Why would we talk about NASCAR? You don’t even care about that.”
“I don’t know. Why wouldn’t we?”
“Okay, whatever. Do you want a Xanax?”
Autumn nodded, choosing not to tell Ariana that she had never even taken Xanax before. She needed the lubrication. These girls were happy and in love and she was not, and that was a distance she might never be able to jump across. Not without pills, at least.
“Why don’t you just take two, then,” Ariana said, dropping the pills into Autumn’s hand. “It’ll do you some good. Now repeat after me: all men are not monsters.”
“All men are monsters,” Autumns said, and Ariana frowned.
“Okay, say this: I will not rain on these girls’ parades.”
“I will rain on these girls’ parades and warn them that all men are two-timing, shit-slinging orangutans who don’t know how to give love to someone who deserves it,” Autumn burped. Ariana threw her hands in the air.
“Whatever. I tried.”
An hour later the girls were finally finishing their dinners, and Autumn was finishing a second vodka soda. The pills had made her feel strange and unsteady and confused, and she figured washing the feeling down with something refreshing would bring her back to normal. Unfortunately all it did was buy her a one-way ticket to crazy town. She was feeling more and more disoriented, and she wanted someone to know about the strange things she’d been noticing. So Autumn flagged down a passing waitress and pulled her close, the room fading in and out around her in woozy, surreal swirls.
“They can’t know,” she whispered, desperate not to let anyone hear.
“Um, excuse me? Who can’t know?”
“Nobody can know that they’re in my stomach.”
“Who is?”
“The gnomes,” Autumn said. “They’re in my stomach and they’re trying to kill me and I want them out!”
“Um, ma’am, what gnomes? Are you okay?”
Autumn glared at the waitress. Why didn’t she understand? Why couldn’t she see what Autumn was seeing? “The gnomes with the guitars, God bless it! They’re flying their little drones around and I need them DEAD!”
The waitress looked at the ceiling. “I’m sorry, the…drones?”
“Yes! They’re alive in my innermost dreams, you stupid slut!”
That’s when Ariana appeared, grabbing Autumn by the shoulder and leading her to the bathroom. “Sorry. First time out since a big breakup,” she said over her shoulder, and all the girls nodded and looked away with knowing, pity-filled eyes.
“Have you lost your fucking mind?” she asked Autumn by the kitchen. “What in the literal hell is wrong with you? It’s just a breakup! Get your shit together!”
“Whatever,” Autumn slurred, leaning against the wall with drooping eyelids. This girl wasn’t Summer, and Autumn was over it. “Why do you care, anyway? No offense, but you are, like, the meanest person ever born, and you smell like pudding.”
Ariana turned for the table again. “Ugh. Go home.”
“But I don’t know where home is anymore,” she whispered, but Ariana just shook her head and disappeared behind a corner.
Autumn Uber’d home and was forced awake by her blaring headache at sunrise the next morning. She laid in bed for hours hating herself, hating her life, hating her big damned mouth, hating the world for not containing Summer in it. All she could remember about her meltdown was seeing a child running to the bathroom, and because of this she somehow convinced herself there were trolls and goblins all around, mingling with the children. She wrote and deleted an apology email to the restaurant, figuring the damage had already been done. She did text Ariana, though, who said it was fine, but that she should never get that drunk again or she would probably get murdered for being so annoying. (Autumn was pretty sure that was still the last invitation she would ever get from Ariana.) She slept on and off all day, alternately vomiting and seeing dreams of herself with Hank, visions of their time together. After all these weeks, and all those drinks, she still could not run from him: she thought of the way he hated bacon, the way he laughed when he was nervous, the way his hair felt after a haircut. And these are the things we store away: those little slivers of each other that remind us that once, we were loved. After all, there is a reason little girls save the flowers their fathers pick for them on Sunday afternoon walks around the neighborhood. Some dormant instinct springs to life, some foreign urge that tells them: this is special. I should save this. So they totter up the stairs to their bedrooms in their muddy dresses with their chubby little legs, stumble into their closets, and press their flowers in the pages of their Barbie books with dirty fingers. Then they place the books on the highest shelf they can reach, armed with the knowledge that somehow, love matters. This is the same reason those same girls hide away love notes in shoeboxes in middle school – they know deep down that they are going to need to remember that rush of having someone pass them a letter that says “for your eyes only.” They are preparing themselves for when they get old and the magic of life fades away and they will need to see something that jolts them back to joy. And Autumn held onto the good memories with everything in her, even when it hurt. Even when she was reminded that love always left.
Soon the dreams came again. For some reason she kept seeing him after the funeral that first day, his eyes broken but somehow still full of wonder, like when you break a glass and the shards still sparkle from the floor. She was grateful for the glimpse of him that her dreams were affording her, but seeing him felt like getting her entrails pulled out. She saw herself, too, her shoulders slumped and her outfit wrinkled, trying to make it all work, running from the same monsters as Hank, and she saw them going out and sitting on that porch, Summer’s porch. She saw them laughing at the absurdity of what was blooming between them, throwing their heads back with newfound abandon. She saw the tangerine traces of a July sunset melting into the treetops over the fence and felt that thing they shared, the terror of what was in front of them, the devastation at what was behind them, and she wanted to run back into time and hug them both, tell them that love was on the way, and warn them not to run from it. It was a single happy moment in both of their tumultuous lives – two people, broken in body and spirit, coming together. Autumn wanted that moment to last forever, but you can’t unmake your past, and Autumn had never been much of the listening kind, anyway.
At the end of every dream, though, time would lurch to a stop and the air would turn amber-colored and they’d be stuck there forever, but the dream versions of her and Hank didn’t seem to mind. Each time they would lay down, say goodnight to one another, and die together.