Monochromatic Gray

I like fall. Even with the fear of trees that I know this experience should have drilled into me, I still am heartbroken by the beauty of fall. So much of this world is monochromatic. Endless green in summer, endless white in winter. But it is the transitions that are the most bursting with color and the most fleeting.

It is these momentary colors that we notice. The leaves setting the branches ablaze, before falling to the ground and becoming little more than trampled garbage. The sunset bleeding out across the sky, desperately trying to hold its head above the water. The hummingbird, with such a little, quick-beating heart that it lives in constant peril of death.

I bet that if you held a hummingbird in your hand you could feel its whole body shake with the beating of its heart. It is alive, violently alive.

I would like to hold a hummingbird in my hand before I die. I think that would teach me something about the world, help me understand a universal secret. The dying are the most desperate. Screaming out to be noticed, scrambling to accomplish as much as possible. I think it is the living who should be so desperate. They have the chance to change themselves based on what they learn, while the dying just die. That is why the world can never move forward. People learn the most important secrets only as soon as it is too late to pass them on.

I am here and soon will be gone. But I don't have brilliant colors. Maybe I should paint my skin the greens and blues and burning red of the hummingbird. And then I'll be reminded of the beating of my heart every second that I live. And when I fall, I'll fall out of the sky.