Days like that day were the only ones I could truly say I saw the world. Days like that day, when I sat in the elements until my fingers were too cold to move, or my clothes gathered sweat and felt too sticky on my skin, and I couldn’t enjoy the sun anymore. Days like that day, where I was not bothered or berated by bickering. I was alone and free to listen to the fleeting voices of those I did not know and the whispered words of the wind through the treetops shed of leaves. My hands prickled from the wind, but I was still able to grip my pen and write at least somewhat coherently, although incoherence was not often a result of the weather. The cold air made my throat feel hot and dry, and the taste of copper crept on my tongue, and for a moment, I wished I was inside. I was surrounded by the ravages of late fall: bare treetops; the ground caked with thousands upon thousands of moldy oak leaves, which had once been so alive with color that was now drained by the chilly temperatures. Of course, late fall also resembled late winter. I lived in a state where winter was pitted perpetually in a purgatory between enjoyably warm and pleasantly frigid and snowy. Our winter was a medium, but it was by no means happy. That day, I looked, mostly. I watched the way the wind blew through the dried and dead stalks of grass, and I wished I could paint that grass, and for a moment, I felt like that grass, but I quit thinking that because wasn't’t about to let myself be that sad. My hand, numb, no longer held my pen and it clattered to the ground, and I wondered what to do. I had no way to tell the time as I sat and waited that day. I had only the dying sunlight behind the clouds to tell me that no one was coming.