Autumn in the Mountains

You are not looking at this mountain from a distance. You are on it — the slope filling everything, the orange so saturated it seems to generate its own heat. Two white lines cross the canvas like something quietly geological, a path or a freeze or a river that decided not to ask permission.

The marks across the hillside are what hold you. Not brushstrokes exactly — more like the surface of the mountain showing through itself. The pattern that lichen makes. The way fire moves through dry grass. The texture that only becomes visible when you are close enough to stop seeing the whole and start reading what it is made of.

From far away, autumn is a color. From here, it is a system — alive, patterned, indifferent to how briefly it lasts.

Jolanta