Falling in love is like autumn. Small, perceptible changes begin to take place—veins of color slowly changing shade—and one at a time the leaves begin to fall. The feeling, the anticipation of the event comes first; in crisp individual moments you inhale and think Yes, this is about to happen. As you savor the change it has already begun. You are already inside of it.

Before you know the leaves are all cascading to the ground fiery orange—like a shower of cold sparks you stand in the fall and notice the electric feeling of commencement, maybe from the cold or maybe coming from inside, and then you too are swept away, wet in the arid swirl of the wind and just another particle enjoying the ride.

The transition taking place before your eyes is the sweetest part—noticing the cold change and welcoming it, glimpsing the shape of things to come, feeling in advance the future in one moment of emotional clairvoyance. To exist temporally in this moment as the world stops to turn on a dime: that is contentment. For the winter will come and go, that delicious frosty Christmastime, and you will sit in warmth and eat up those holy moments with your loves; and then the thaw, that moist harsh time when you are already sick of cold and tolerate the slush and dirty ice, looking forward again to the change and the chaos of spring—its natural asymmetric growth which is messy and liberating. And all these things, all these seasons, are in a way the heralds of death while you’re in them, proof of the world and the universe’s immutable laws of change, incomprehensibly vast rotating wheel—but as you stand in fixed vantage point to observe the seasons change you have now become eternal, on the axle and out of time. The summer is coming, the winter is coming, and autumn and spring are coming too—as you watch the wheel spin and observe your own place, for now in the center, your body is swept away, another grateful cog present in the clockwork of the universe, another happy leaf riding in the wind.