Brown Leaf, A Short Story

It's funny how things that used to matter didn't anymore. Abhas laid back on his bed, gazing through the window blinds at the backyard trees gently swaying in the wind. There were thick branches and spindly branches. There were green leaves next to orange and yellow ones. Red, flowery things that were neither leaves nor flowers clumped toward the right of his view. He sat there and stared and thought about how it didn't matter anymore. It was funny because he had made such a big deal of it at the time. Fussing with the girl on AIM, desperately making his case. His behavior had been lawyerly, if lawyers were young, vain boys building cases to impress girls. He had said the things he was supposed to say, things the other boys had said. It had worked for them but it hadn't worked for him. Maybe they had meant it more. Maybe there was something in the timing he had missed. Maybe when they had done it, it was real, but when he had done it, it was fake. Maybe it was always fake. But she had liked it when it came from them. And now she was gone. She was a flash of images—maybe three. She was a mixture of feelings—mostly embarrassment. And she didn't matter. She used to matter a lot but now she didn't at all. Abhas imagined the dead, brown leaves that were surely resting on the cracked concrete beneath the rich boughs. They had been replaced by newer leaves, leaves with color. Their time had passed. She was a brown leaf now. Not just her, but everything around her that lingered in Abhas' mind. It was all now a huge, brown leaf. It was weird. Different things mattered now. New things. New leaves had taken her place. Maybe these new things would always matter. Evergreens. He didn't think that they would. He thought that most of those things would eventually stop mattering, if not all of them. New things that mattered would take their place, as they had taken the place of the things before them. But for now, they mattered. He was content with that. “There will always be brown leaves,” he thought, “and there will always be leaves with color.”

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