Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.

The sullen boy sitting before me is not my husband, and the girl he is fretting over isn't me, will never be me.

I watch the ashes swim around like dandelion puffs, making swirls where bodies and walls once stood.

I never wanted to live forever," she says. "I just wanted enough time.

There was a desperate undercurrent to our marriage--a feeling of being in a dream from which I couldn't seem to awaken. A nagging sense that my life, laid out so neatly like the clothes Deirdre left on my divan, was no longer my own.

Time was our very first king. We all live our lives to the aggressive ticking of the clock. We don't question that our lives are a grid of seconds; even our pulses oblige. No succeeding king can hope to hold this kind of power.

Suddenly the clouds seem high above us. They’re moving over us in an arch, circling the planet. They have seen abysmal oceans and charred, scorched islands. They have seen how we destroyed the world. If I could see everything, as the clouds do, would I swirl around this remaining continent, still so full of color and life and seasons, wanting to protect it? Or would I just laugh at the futility of it all, and meander onward, down the earth’s sloping atmosphere?