What I Missed

I buried my father. And in the strange silence that followed, I learned something about the heart. It can split open in a way that feels final, yet it keeps moving anyway. It beats without agreement. It holds on even when you don’t. There’s a kind of defiance in that. A refusal you never asked for.

November makes it hard to pretend. The days turn darker. Leaves flare like brief fires before dropping without a sound. The sky lowers and everything feels suspended. It’s a month shaped by grief, a place where rage can sit beside sorrow without needing to explain itself.

Life feels most fragile in the spaces between the good moments. You move through an afternoon that seems ordinary and then something breaks through. A memory or a sound or the way someone’s shadow crosses the floor. It reminds you that everything you love exists on a thin edge. That nothing is promised. That even the steady things can vanish without warning.

So I pay attention to the small beautiful things, not because they fix anything but because they refuse to disappear. The sunlight slips across the room and hits the colored glass birds on the shelf, sending brief flashes of color across the wall before fading. A child laughs outside in the cold and it carries farther than it should. These are the moments that keep me awake to the world. They remind me I am still here. Still moving. Still somehow alive in the aftermath of everything I’ve lost.

Trees don’t really turn red or gold at all. The colors were always there, hidden under the green. Autumn just strips away what covered them. I think about that sometimes. How things reveal themselves only when the world begins to let go.

Maybe that’s why the season unsettles me. Not because of what changes, but because of what appears when you stop pretending not to see. I’ve learned that people don’t suddenly become cruel or careless or confusing. Those traits were always there, tucked beneath whatever version of themselves they preferred to show. Autumn reminds me of that. The way a single change in light can expose everything you tried to overlook. The strained dynamics. The complicated loyalties. The subtle damage that was happening long before you had the words for it. It’s strange how clarity arrives only after the mind stops pushing and the truth settles on its own.

When I was little, I used to lie down in a pile of leaves and watch them float and swirl above me. The air moved them in loose, unpredictable circles, rising and dropping without rhythm. I remember the smell of the damp earth underneath. The scrape of the stems along my arms. The way the world felt strangely silent from that angle. I didn’t understand it then, but it was one of the first moments I realized how much can rearrange itself around you while you stay still.

Science says the leaves fall because the trees seal themselves off, cutting the flow that once held everything in place. The separation happens slowly at first, then all at once, and the leaves loosen their grip without a sound. I come back to that more than I expect. How letting go isn’t remarkable. How the real break happens without warning, long before anything touches the ground.

I remember my dad standing at the end of the driveway, the cream jacket zipped to his throat, his hands shoved deep in the pockets like he was bracing against something more than cold. Crimson leaves kept sweeping around him, skimming the wet pavement before lifting again. The air carried the smell of woodsmoke mixed with the faint chill of late November, the kind of scent I tried to take in fully so I wouldn’t lose the memory later. He was talking to someone across the yard, his voice carrying in bursts when the wind eased, steady and unchanged, exactly how I remember him. The light was fading fast, turning the whole scene a kind of bruised gold. I remember standing there longer than I should have, without understanding why. A scene that didn’t feel important until much later, when I realized it was one of the last glimpses of him untouched by the weight that was already building in him.

What comes back to me now is how simple it all looked back then. How I stood there watching my dad, and everything around him was moving, the leaves, the light, the cold wind cutting through the yard, while he stayed exactly where he was. I didn’t understand then how often life works like that. How the world can shift in an instant while you’re rooted to the spot. How something can break in its own way, indifferent to whether you’re ready.

There are days when I wish I could go back and stand in those moments again, not to change anything, but to pay closer attention. To the way people breathed. To the way the light fell. To the way I moved through the world without understanding what any of it would someday mean. I didn’t know then which memories would stay and which would fade. I didn’t know which ordinary seconds would turn heavy with importance years later. Sometimes it feels like the hardest part of living is realizing how much you were witnessing without knowing you should look closer.

Time has a way of taking things you didn’t realize you were handing over. Truth stays tucked away until the season turns and strips everything down to what it always was. There’s a bitterness in that, a sharpness you can’t file down. You go years believing the world is one thing, only to wake up and see the hairline fractures that were there from the start. The assumptions you trusted. The stories you built around them. The ways you shaped yourself to match what was never built for you. Nothing dramatic. Just a steady accumulation of unnoticed days that rearrange the ground under your feet without announcing themselves. What unsettles me now is how ordinary it all looked while it was happening. How the real breaking happens long before you recognize it. And the truth is, you can stand completely still while your life alters itself into something you never agreed to.

Maybe that’s all any of us are doing. Moving through chapters we didn’t realize were changing. Carrying losses we never saw forming. Learning to exist inside the aftermath of the small seconds we barely noticed. There’s no tidy lesson in it. Just the fact that we go on anyway, altered in ways we didn’t choose, trying to understand what remains.