Autumnus - Fragment of a Book that has Never Existed

1.

Remember this, only autumn is real.

2.

Old autumns are not dead autumns. Certain seasons may not be lost forever, like some discarded and barely remembered childhood toy. Though becoming increasingly harder to find, he found there were still traces of them around. A fragment of an October afternoon from childhood - a melancholy evening busy with shadow from late adolescence - perhaps even an angle of a street in those labyrinthine and nowhere towns that seemed to populate his twenties.
(His twenties. Like a decade in time rather than a decade of his life).
His skin creased into early middle age, and the resonances of these old autumns became stronger, -and not only in autumn either.

There might be, for instance, in the bright wet optimism of a spring day (perhaps after a light and sunny rain) a sudden breath of something that tasted of a shadow. A very particular kind of shadow, one cast by a childhood street lamp in late November- just come on in a pink dusk - that stood at a corner of the playground he knew intimately well as a child.

Perhaps on a rainy, not so optimistic day, toward the end of January, the play of kitchen lights in the dark and forever puddles of a walk back from work, might call to him, involuntarily, the London suburbs-

(There is a blank in the text here)

Even in the heights of summer, there might be a certain twist of sky that would bring to him those deep and magnificent skies of early September. A cooling blue that might taste of gold and a certain dreamy hope of something that rumoured it might last forever.

These old autumns, or rather, fragments of these old autumns

(The fragment ends)