He stood staring out the window at the trees, a quiet sense of distress coursing through him like the first hint of frost that causes leaves to begin to whither. Finished blossoming and bearing fruit over the spring and summer, the proud trees were embracing autumn, rushing headlong into winter.

She waited for him with consuming expectation.

How much I’m like a tree, he thought. How much like those trees. Except that they would find life in spring on the other side of winter, and I? I am resigned to an unending death in the long cold winter of my continued—if altered—existence.

“I can’t tell you how to be a man!”

At least that’s how it felt. His world was becoming colorless, like those last moments before the true bleakness of the cold, hard, chiaroscuro of the circle of life. Prone to think too much about too little, he simply could not reconcile himself to the life he had lived and was living still, even if just barely.

“You’re a monster!”

To his mind, the world right on the other side of the window was full of life, full of the pleasures that come from doing. There had been times in his life when he was totally alive, fully able, and completely immersed in living. But now, every day was filled with the same set of questions, the same pondering of the same inevitability, the same colorless continuation.

“Your goal in life is to destroy me!”

His summer had passed, and autumn was hastily devouring the vitality and beauty of that summer, returning him to the gray, brown, damp compost from which he had sprung. He watched himself as he moved through his days, wondering who that person was and why he did what he did.

“I would rather go to my grave alone than spend five more minutes with you.”

He turned away from the window, picked up the newspaper, and slowly moved toward his favorite chair in front of the fireplace, his slowness more a result of the lack of need to move quickly than from the lack of ability to do so. He felt emaciated far beyond the withering of his limbs, aware of the loss of his virility in every movement, the vitality ebbing from him like the light at sunset.

Despair had gotten a foothold in him during her illness, a bit at a time, until it had reached full bloom, and his internal desolation was made complete.

Lowering himself into his seat, he felt his own weight, or, more correctly, the lack of it. He heard the clock ticking as he sat, almost as though it was marking his every movement, somehow emphasizing that he had become much more frail than he once had been, even if only in his perception of himself and his physical reality.

“Why is this happening?”

His eyes landing on a painting over the fireplace that he had purchased for his wife, he thought about how the provocative beauty of the woman in the painting called to him as she completely represented his wife. The actual subject—the woman there in the painting—didn’t exist; she merely brought to mind and was replaced by the image of his wife: the most beautiful, most desirable woman he had ever laid eyes on. And he paused, midway through the process of settling into the chair, caught up in his memory of love and desire for her.

“How did we get here?”

Closing the paper, he let his mind drift to her. She had been the most wonderful thing he had ever discovered, so beautiful, so absolutely entrancing. She loved to touch things, loved the texture of nature, and would often stop to feel the leaves of a plant, or to lightly brush the moss growing on the side of a fallen tree. The wide-eyed way that she considered creation was delightful. Her laugh had been full and contagious, not causing him to laugh also, but rather bringing him joy through its very sound. He treasured everything about her, even when she would say things that might hurt him.

Her cries of pain and anguish filled his ears, and he was unable to respond.

He glanced at the floor in front of the fireplace where the two of them had lain so many times, both in sleepy repose and in fiery embrace. He could see her in his mind’s eye, the silhouette of her body that had made him complete, the shine of her hair that had captivated him. When he looked at her body—the fire flickering on her skin with the shadows dancing around her curves—he had been aroused to his very core, but not with a sense of urgency; it was more in a way that made him desire to simply look at her for the rest of his life, for the eternity that this moment represented. He could feel the heat from her body as it rivaled that of the fire. And the connection that he had felt between them was as steady and solid as he could imagine.

“I can’t breathe! Don’t let them take me!”

There had been a moment—many moments, really—when he had felt his very soul reach out to her, reach out to and expand with, engulf, and intertwine with hers. He was, in those moments, transported from himself to a sense of unity and exclusion: Unity because he felt completely with his wife; exclusion because the world was shut out and the only thing that existed was the two of them, as one. In fact, right then, the concept of existence was undefined, as there was only the two of them: intertwined, consumed, and bound; unique though indistinguishable, like two colors of paint being mixed together on an artist’s palette.

“What will you do when I am gone?”

Yet, it was the ultimate in self-deception. How devastating to experience such rapture only to discover that you are now alone with the experience, that the connection that you thought you were experiencing doesn’t exist, that the finest moment of reality you had ever known lives only in your mind. Had it really happened? Or was it the ultimate self-delusion? She is gone, and the temporary illusion gone with her. A realization that drains the color from your life, because the color that was there was only in your mind; it wasn’t real; it never existed. Something that real couldn’t just . . . cease to exist.

“I loved you.”

The clock was slowing down. He locked his eyes on the last of the leaves hanging—crumpled—on the cherry tree outside, trembling in the gentle wind, desperately holding onto the branch that had both brought it into the world and then provided for its continuing existence. Trembling in the gentle wind. He liked that thought, that image. He continued to watch it until his eyes slowly closed and his hands relaxed, the paper slipping from them to the floor.

The fire in the fireplace had burned out long ago.

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