Treasures of a Lost Autumn

Autumn in Kashmir carries echoes of laughter, transformation, and the fleeting beauty of fields and skies I once knew.

- Peer Mohammad Amir Qureshi

This year, autumn arrived like an unexpected guest: swift, untimely, almost startling.

It slipped through the days like sand through my fingers, leaving behind only a faint shimmer of a season I once lived in fully, now remembered in fragments.

Time seems to dissolve in this light, leaving memories as golden as the leaves beneath the willows.

Along the village path, cicadas performed their trembling orchestra. Their chorus was piercing yet intimate, a herald of the equinox.

There is a magic in autumn that always feels deliberate: the way trees shed emerald silks for crimson tatters, a reminder that beauty, however radiant, visits and departs.

I wandered past paddy fields where the stream once glimmered like molten glass. Now, burdened with plastic waste, it murmurs like a tired vein of the earth. Still, the air carries the scent of rain, cool and sharp. The willows stand as solemn sentinels beneath a pale sky, their leaves falling one by one, soft farewells stitched into the wind.

Above, cicadas continue their stubborn devotion. Some sing with abandon, intoxicated by the moment. Others fall silent, guarding secrets only the trees understand.

I lifted my phone, hoping to trap the sound, the motion, the season, in a frame. The effort feels absurd. Some moments resist capture.