The Season That Won't Return

October arrived the way it always did: in the conversations of others.

At the coffee shop, two women discussed the sudden need for scarves. The barista drew leaf patterns in foam while explaining the return of the cinnamon blend. Outside, someone dragged a ladder toward a storefront, orange garlands spilling from a cardboard box at their feet.

Alice watched it all through the window, her fingers wrapped around a cup that could have been filled with anything. The warmth against her palms registered as data, nothing more. Temperature without meaning.

The couple at the next table debated apple orchards versus pumpkin patches. Their enthusiasm landed somewhere beyond Alice's reach, radio signals from a distant station she could no longer tune into. She remembered, distantly, that she used to have opinions on such things. Now the words drifted past her, autumn vocabulary in a language she'd forgotten how to speak.

"You're coming to the harvest festival, right?"

Noah from accounting stood beside her desk, holding a flyer that looked hand-drawn. Probably his daughter's work; the pumpkins had faces, the scarecrows wore bow ties.

Alice's screen reflected her neutral expression back at her. "When is it?"

"This weekend. Same as every year." He set the flyer on her desk, next to a stack of reports she'd been staring through rather than at. "Holly makes that apple bread you love. Remember? The one you asked for the recipe of."

The recipe. Yes. It existed somewhere, folded into a cookbook she hadn't opened since-

"I might have plans," Alice replied.

Noah waited for an elaboration that wouldn't come. The office hummed with its usual Tuesday afternoon rhythm: keyboards, the printer's mechanical breathing, someone's music playing too softly to identify but loud enough to notice.

"Well, if you change your mind..." He tapped the flyer once before returning to his desk.

Alice looked at the cartoon pumpkins with their impossible smiles. She used to love this season. The thought arrived like a textbook fact: true but weightless.

Memory was treacherous in its timing.

Standing in the grocery store, Alice reached for butternut squash and suddenly remembered Sophia's hand cutting one open two autumns ago. The way she's laughed at the stringy insides, comparing them to Alice's hair after a lake swim. They'd been preparing for their annual thing. That's what Sophia called it, "our thing," as if naming it more specifically might diminish its importance.

The lake. Always the lake in October, when the tourists had fled and the water reflected the changing trees like stained glass. They'd been going since college, first as part of a larger group that gradually dissolved into careers and marriages and geographic dispersal, until it was just the two of them maintaining the tradition.

Sophia would bring the soup, different each year but always featuring whatever gourd looked most promising at the farmer's market. Alice brought the bread and wine, and that thick blanket they'd bought at a roadside shop a different October, when they'd gotten lost and found that town with the covered bridge.

The butternut squash in Alice's hand felt heavier than it should. She put it back.

The day insisted on being October.

A coffee shop she'd never noticed before had written "HOUSE SPECIAL: MAPLE CARDAMOM LATTE" across its window in chalk. The words seemed aggressive in their seasonality.

Three blocks later, a song drifted from someone's open car window, that indie-folk tune Sophia had played on repeat during their last drive to the lake trail. Alice's body remembered the rhythm before her mind could defend against it. Her stride faltered.

She turned down Morrison Street without thinking, then realized her mistake. The Saturday market would be there, in full autumn glory. Sure enough: booths selling cider and scarves and those tiny decorative gourds that served no purpose except to say "October" to anyone who looked at them.

The woman at the honey stand called out, "Haven't seen you in a while! Where's your friend?"

Alice pretended not to hear.

Evening came early now, another October insistence.

Alice meant to go home. She'd walked to the subway entrance twice, stood at the top of the stairs watching commuters descend into fluorescent pragmatism. But her feet kept finding excuses; a different route might have fewer crowds, the other entrance had better cell service.

The lies we tell ourselves are always the most transparent.

By the time she admitted where she was going, she'd already walked two-thirds of the way there. The lake trail entrance looked exactly the same: wooden arch with the park service sign, gravel parking lot empty except for two cars belonging to evening joggers.

She hesitated at the threshold. Not because she was afraid of the memories--those had been haunting her all day anyway--but because crossing under that arch felt like admitting something she wasn't ready to name.

it's just a place, she told herself. Wood and water and dying leaves.

Her feet knew the trail, even after a year's absence. Every root, every spot where the path widened or narrowed. Muscle memory carried her forward while her mind floated somewhere above, watching herself walk toward the inevitable.

The clearing opened suddenly, the way it always had, trees parting like curtains to reveal the lake, still as glass in the windless dusk.

Their spot was unchanged. The flat rock that jutted into the water, large enough for a blanket and two people who didn't mind sitting close. Someone else had been there recently; a beer bottle sat precisely where Sophia used to prop her thermos.

The memory arrived complete and merciless:

Last October. Sophia standing on this rock, arms crossed, that expression she wore when trying not to cry. Alice's own words hanging in the air between them, sharp and irrevocable: "I don't think I can keep pretending this is enough."

She'd meant the friendship. The careful boundaries they'd maintained for years, the way they dated other people but always returned to this October ritual, to each other but never quite to each other. Alice had wanted more or nothing, no more in-between.

Sophia's response: silence. Then, quietly, "I know."

But knowing and choosing were different things. Sophia chose the safety of what they'd always been. Alice chose the certainty of ending over the agony of almost.

They'd stood there as the sun set, not touching, not speaking, watching the lake hold the dying light. When it was dark, Sophia left first. Alice stayed until the cold became unbearable, then walked back alone.

She never called. Neither did Sophia. Sometimes the loudest endings happen in the perfect silence.

Alice stood on the rock now, alone, understanding with brutal clarity she'd lost.

Not just Sophia, but her capacity to feel October. The season hadn't abandoned her; she'd exiled herself from it, unable to separate the sensory joy of autumn from the person who'd made those sensations matter.

The lake reflected the last rust-coloured light. Beautiful and empty.

She could leave now. Accept this numbness as permanent, this internal winter that no external season could thaw. It would be easier. Grief, after all, was just love with nowhere to go, and sometimes it was simpler to stop trying to find it a home.

Or.

Alice pulled out her phone, opened the note she'd written last year but never sent. The recipe for Sophia's butternut squash soup, transcribed from memory during a particularly cruel December night. She'd thought about making it a dozen times but always stopped, knowing it would taste like grief.

But maybe grief was better than nothing.

She sat on the rock--their rock, always their rock, even now--and typed out a grocery list. Butternut squash. Cream. Sage. She'd make it wrong, probably. It wouldn't taste like Sophia's version, wouldn't carry the same warmth.

But it would taste like October. Like trying.

Walking back, Alice noticed the leaves.

Not with the old joy, that remained buried with everything else she'd left on that rock a year ago. But she noticed them. Their particular rustle, different from summer's fuller sound. The way they gathered in the hollows of the trail, creating temporary landscapes that would be gone by morning.

One landed on her shoulder. Deep orange, perfectly maple, a cliché of autumn beauty. She brushed it off, but gently.

The parking lot held three cars now. A couple emerged from another trail, holding hands, laughing about something private and previous. Alice moved aside to let them pass, catching the scent of cinnamon from someone's coffee, the wool-and-wood smoke smell of October evenings.

She didn't smile. Didn't feel that old surge of seasonal affection. But she didn't feel nothing either. Something between numbness and sensation, like circulation returning to a sleeping limb.

Tomorrow she would buy squash. She would stand in her kitchen attempting to recreate something irreplaceable, and it would be inadequate, and she would eat it anyway. This was not healing. This was not moving on. This was simply what came after an ending that had no words: The slow uncertain process of teaching herself to taste autumn again, one failed recipe at a time.

The lake held its silence behind her. The season continued for everyone else.

For Alice, October was a language she might never again speak fluently. But tonight, walking back through the gathering dark, she remembered at least the shape of the words.