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You are Spring.
You are the first warmth of the breeze, the determined yellow of a flower blooming for the sun, the scent of freshly cut grass. You are life, you are alive, and you have a heart that thrums in time with the pulse of the earth, a heart so big that you sometimes feel like you can eat the entire world.
People call you the bringer of life. They laud the gentleness in your eyes, your smile that tilts at the corners just right and lights up the butterflies fluttering like leaves swaying in the warm breeze around you.
And then there’s him.
_____
He is the underlying chill to the sun, the noisy crunch of rusty leaves underneath the heel of their boots as they stare at the fiery blaze he lights in the crowns of the trees.
He is Autumn, they tell you, he is the very opposite of all that you stand for. You should avoid him, he’ll taint you and leave you cold.
But you are curious, your curiosity has always made a fool out of your too big heart and too wide eyes, and you don’t heed their warnings.
He makes you curious.
You watch from afar (you keep up the pretence) as he tilts his head back and laughs, grin caught in the startled blue of a sky that frames him like a picture, though you know that that isn’t possible because what picture can encompass all that he is? You find it endearing. The way his tongue pokes out between his lips as he kills everything that you made alive.
Summer watches you with worry in her green eyes. She doesn’t understand the spark within him that you do.
_____
He spots you one day, as the clouds float high in the sky above the two of you in wisps that you think resemble cotton candy. You think that that might’ve been an intentional choice on his part. He looks at you and you feel cold as you meet his eyes.
He looks at you with a familiarity you don’t think you deserve; he stares at you like he can see into your soul (you don’t have one but for him you wouldn’t mind).
He smiles, exposing two canines that glint in the light of a cold sun, and continues trailing his hands across the trunks of birch trees. He is igniting an entire forest. You secretly want it to be for you.
_____
When he ghosts his lips across yours you don’t feel the rawness of death that you have been warned against. You feel like you are on fire, a leaf dancing within the clutch of his hands, spinning to a rhythm only the two of you can hear. Vita a mortam, and together the two of you are a phoenix.
You want to reach out and cup his face between your palms, run your thumbs across his skin, feel the warmth his every move kindles within you on the tips of your fingers, but he shies away whenever you try and only smiles, a tiny thing that he nurses, that makes his eyes disappear in the folds of his features.
It is only when your eyes are closed that he allows himself to get close enough to suck the breath out of your lungs, inhaling each of your exhales like a dying man. He says it sometimes hurts to look at you. You burn brighter than the sun.
(You are his sun.)
_____
The two of you are lying on a bed of leaves. You are looking up at the sky. He is looking at you.
Your are on your back, hands crossed behind your head, eyelashes casting shadows on your cheeks and he is beside you, propped up on one arm. He is sweeping a bluebird feather over the nonchalant curve of your lips, the bridge of your nose, the arch of your brow. He follows the line of your jaw down to the column of your neck, brushing the feather as if it were his lips up and down, up and down until you are begging him to stop.
You unfurl a dandelion from the palm of your hand for him instead and he looks at you with wonder. He is child-like in his amusement, laughing as he watches the spores scatter in the wind. You are reminded of the first time you saw him.
You are reminded of the first time you fell in love.
_____
Summer taps you on the shoulder the next day, her heat scorching you and you wince. She tells you that Winter is coming, that Winter won’t be so forgiving, that Winter will destroy you.
Her words sear you, her gaze scalding.
For the first time your heart stutters in your chest.
_____
Winter comes before you can visit him for the last time, crystalline tendrils reaching across the land you love so much, icy glare like frostbite on your skin. Winter frowns at you, an avalanche wrapped in the delicate gauze of pristine, freshly fallen snow, and he is nowhere to be seen, gone overnight, disappeared into its whirlwind.
This time you feel chilled to your very bone.
You don’t think you’ve ever felt so cold (you feel like you’re dying).
_____
On December 22nd you lay curled in the ice, staring blankly at an ashen grey sky when the wind carries a flash of orange to you. At first you mistake the fiery leaf for real flame, its presence loud and abrasive on a silent backdrop of dull silver, but when it lands in your hands you realise it is from him. The last leaf of Autumn, preserved forever in your palms.
He still waits for you.
You press it to the rabbit pulse of your heart.
He is the gentle caress of a flame that makes you come alive, and you are his sun.
(The only thing that makes him complete)