Falling Leaf

"No, I am wrong. You are not hopeless at all."

He shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe I was...yesterday. Today? Well, it seems to me a lot's happened in the past couple of days."

"So. You are a romantic. A hopeful romantic, yes? What am I going to do with you?"

He smiled at the leaf in her hand, at the smile in her eyes. He smiled at the possibilities life gave us from time to time, at the infinite varieties of loss and love outside each and every window, love often within reach, and sometimes – forever just out of reach.

He stood, held out his hand, and she reached up to him.

Time.

All he could think about was time. There was not a moment to lose.

"What are you going to do with me?" he repeated as he looked into her eyes. "I'm not sure that it matters, as long as we're together."

She looked at him as he spoke, lost in a thought. "Are you a wizard?"

"Me?" He grinned again, then shrugged his shoulders. "Well, you never can tell about these things, I reckon."

"I think you must be. There is so much magic around you."

"Magic?" he said, then he took her hand in his and kissed it, lost inside a million questions.

She held the fallen leaf up to the sky, studied the shape of this day with the sun on her face, and then she saw the structure of her life inside the veiny lattice...

And perhaps Suki's life, and Viktor's too.

And this man, this magician by her side? Could someone like him ever be bound by something so illusory?

"Yes," she said after looking at him for a moment. "Together. All of us, we are bound together. Us, the world we make, the magic we share." Somehow, she could tell he knew exactly what she was thinking, and she wondered what he might see in the structure of this leaf...but then...she already knew the answer to that question.

All she had do was look at this man, and his Falling Leaf, and everything became clear again. For whatever reason time had brought them together, and she held the little leaf to her heart.

(C)2015 Adrian Leverkühn | ABW