The light breaks like tired glass
soft, strained, unsure of itself.
It falls across the orchard in gold
and bruises, where apples rot gently
at the foot of trees that no longer bother
to reach for the sun.

The equinox comes
like someone you once loved
standing in your doorway,
saying nothing.

For a moment
the world holds its breath.
Light and dark,
neck and neck.

And then the balance tips.
Always, it tips.

I walk through fields gone hollow with wind.
The air tastes of iron, and endings.
Leaves give up without a fight now —
not a blaze, not a fury,
just a quiet letting go,
and I envy them.

There is a kind of mercy
in falling.
There is a kind of grace
in becoming less.

Still, I am full of ache.
My chest is a hearth
where no one's embraced in years.
The fire cold,
the ice forming.

I call out to the sky,
but even the crows have left —
even the dusk seems uninterested
in staying.

They say the veil is thinnest now.
That what’s gone
leans close to what’s still here.
So I sit in the dirt
and hope some version of myself
might return with the fog.
The one who knew how to feel full.
The one who believed in light
even as it fled.

But the sun slips down like a secret,
and the night arrives hungry.
The stars blink like distant answers
to questions I no longer ask.

And I think
maybe this is it.
Maybe I am meant to lie fallow,
a field in waiting.

Not dead.
Not alive.
Just brimming with the quiet
of what might one day grow again.