The trees have long ago dropped their leaves. Autumnal cold winds whirl around them. Short breathing pauses only from being stirred up. You can not just fall down and lie down, not even as a leaf. One settles at my feet or is settled. A short stay until the next gust takes hold and blows, who knows where. I take my damp fingers out of my jacket pocket, bend down and pick it up. It feels brittle and rough. Soon it will be decomposed. But in my hand it turns green again, as if it were still connected to the branch from which it grew. How much energy the tree had invested in this leaf when it budded, unfolded and shone in the rich, deep green in summer. Nothing is there anymore. Only in my hand. As if dreaming about the summer dream again, in the middle of autumn.
I have long since left my illusions behind me. Autumn reality of the inevitable, almost pacified, almost realistic. Occasionally broken by the gentle wind of euphoria. Storms belong in the summer. Not in the fall. It is easy to shake off the dreams, in this season, like the leaves of the tree. The supply has long been cut. A touch is enough and they fall to the ground. Because it is inevitable, I decided that I do not mind. But what are dreams about the inevitability. I take my hand out of my jacket pocket and grab one of them, which the wind had blown right to my feet. At the same time I thought, it would not be possible to accept. Not even what is right on my feet. The numb fingers could not afford it. But they are warm and mobile, as before. He returns to the place he has always had from which I drove him away. But dreams have something incorruptible. They know the facts, and whistle on it. With him returns the summer, which I had already ticked off. Confusing uncertainty in the midst of certainty. Also the one of its impossibility. A summer dream in the middle of autumn.
For a long time I have resigned myself to the fact that in the end one should not play the beginning anymore, but one has to submit to the irreversibility of time. Everything else is inappropriate. Soon the winter will come. It’s always going forward. Only a glimpse of the summer, which is long gone, remains. However, I had overlooked that it lives on, and if it’s just a hunch, in all the leaves that are lying on the ground. Even if they are no longer green and juicy, they carry it in themselves. And when I touch it, this one that imposes itself on me, then summer returns and with it the dream that belongs to the summer. It no longer has reason in the fall of sanity. But the dream does not care about sanity. Certainly not for reason. It is what it is, almost like love. Even in the fall, in which it does not belong. Not because it denies the facts, but because it just does not care. Self-sufficient, as if there were nothing more natural than a summer dream in the middle of autumn.
All of a sudden, I leave everything I have left behind me, let me in. Maybe also because I have no choice, a little way, because the dream has reconnected, just like that, fueled strength and freshness. Not because he can reverse time or deny the development that continues. It is much easier. Ridiculously easy. To bring the summer into the autumn, like an island in the ocean of the seemingly immutable. It is possible. To start playing again. No, not just to play, to be. Feeling life flare up with that intensity, the fire that had already gone out, and also the confidence that it could be good. Can be good again. Because ultimately, there is no experience, no encounter like the other. And you are the summer dream in the middle of autumn.
