The Girl who was Autumn

I never talked to her, never even knew her name. The most we exchanged were a few glances as I passed by in the call centre. She reminded me of Frida Kahlo, an echo of Mexico I've never known. Small, dark eyes, dark skin, hair night-black, in the way that nobody whose forebears are English can ever have.
She worked there for a few months. I said thanks to her once when she opened the door for me, and that was all. The odd thing about her was that she reminded me of autumn, as if a quiet afternoon in October had wrapped itself in the form of a woman. This was accompanied by a curiously well realised image, a kind of involuntary daydream. We were in a house, a kitchen to be precise. The kitchen was on the ground floor at the back of the house, and contained a spacious seating area. Comfy armchairs, a wooden breakfast table. Outside the windows, across a kitchen top landscape of a sink, a draining board holding drying dishes and cutlery, was a garden. The garden was in an 'L' shape, running parallel to the kitchen, and pooling round the back of the house into a rough square. The garden was lined with trees, creating a pleasantly shadowed, hidden feeling.
It was unclear, in this image, whether we were lovers of sharing a house together, but in this daydream, which rapidly adopted a feeling of a memory, it was morning. We were getting ready to go to work, that rushed-morning feeling; cups of coffee and the radio turned on low, skin still drying from showers and minds filing away dream memories and sleep ghosts.
It was undeniably October, one of those warm and mysterious October days where the sky never seems still, shifting clouds showing pale blue skies, comforting rays of sunlight through flickering branches. Falling on discarded leaves in the garden.
The feeling in this dream was accompanied by a quiet happiness, I don't know why.
Every time she passed me, this image came to mind. It seemed very clear, very lucid, and as I have said, had the quality of a memory, of something experienced.
As is the way in the call-centre, sales agents never stay for long. It is badly paid and tiring work, and when I returned after the Christmas break, she did not. I didn't notice her absence at first, but a week or two in, I realised that I hadn't seen her for a while, and that she had probably left.
I hold it like a memory, this strange resonance, a flash of a morning sharing a coffee with a girl who was autumn.