The golden leaves rustle as the soft breeze whisper its sweet words across the branches of the willowy trees. A nostalgic melody plays above the trees, its haunting harmony intertwining with the sweet scent of the autumn blossoms. Piano notes twinkle, rising in crescendo and falling in decrescendo over and over again.

He sits under a tree, one leg over another, with a book in his hand. The pages of the book are just turning yellow with age. The vanilla scent of the aging paper rises to his nostrils, and he sniffs in appreciation of the timeless. Paper may be antiquated in today's technology based society that used digital platforms ubiquitously, but books will never go out of style.

"Can I join you?"

He looks up as he hears a gentle voice above his head. He sees a young woman about the age of twenty or so wearing a gingham shirt dress with a white cardigan over it. He notes how her cheeks were dusted with the faint outlines of tan freckles as she brushes her long reddish brown bangs from her forehead.

"Sure," he said. "Feel free to sit wherever you want."

The young woman bent her knees, covering her bottom with her hands as she kneels down and sits next to him. She puts her satchel next to her and smooths her dress over her knees.

"What are you reading?" she asks him.

He shows her the cover of his book. "Jules Verne. Around the world in eighty days."

She smiles and nods. "Ah, I love his writing. My favorite is either The Mysterious Island or Journey to the Center of the World."

He smiles back. "I like those works too, but my favorite is this one, it's probably the seventh time I've read this book. I just love how I feel like I can travel the world in the several hours it takes me to read this book."

She laughs, "Yeah, when it really should take eighty days."

He laughs along with her.

They sit together in silence for a while, her looking on as he flipped the pages of his book from time to time. The piano continues playing in the background, its melody having lulled to a soft and slow tune.

She asks him, "Do you know what song this is?"

He looks up and gazes up at the tree tops. He shakes his head.

"No idea, and I have no idea where the music is coming from either."

She replies. "I think it might be Mozart, one of his sonatas. It sounds like him."

She adds as an afterthought. "Doesn't this just feel like a dream?"

He looks at her, noting how her eyelashes dusts the top of her cheekbones as she looks at her folded hands in her lap.

"I have a feeling we're in a dream too. What do you think this dream is about?"

She is about to answer him when the faint outline of a figure appears before them. It was a hologram of a girl dancing barefoot in a cornfield. Her hair flies around her head, forming a halo of unrestrained curls. She dances lightly on her toes, her arms reaching above her head towards the sun.

They gaze at this image of the girl clad in sunlight in the cornfields for a while before she asks,

"Who is she? Do you know her?"

He answers, "Yes. She was my first love."

She looks at him.

"Why did you love her?"

"She was gregarious and ebullient and vivacious, and she brought color in my life. She was beautiful."

She nods, "She sounds like a charm."

He turns to look at her, closing his book. "What about you? Why are you here on this autumn day, sitting next to me and talking to me about my first love?"

She shrugs, her thin shoulders straining against the white fabric of her cardigan. "I don't know why I'm here and why I'm sitting next to you. One moment, I was asleep, and the next, I was standing in the pile of leaves over there, and I saw you. There was something about you that made me want to talk to you. Something indescribable."

She looks at him, into his eyes and notices for the first time the color and shape of them. They look like kaleidoscopes of shards of glass that melted into each other, forming different colors as the light hit them at different angles. She can't describe the exact color of his eyes, they are ineffable. But they are also beautiful.

She turns around when she sees another image in the periphery of her sight. This time, it is a vision of a boy, a golden haired boy around the age of six. He is laughing and talking at the same time, saying words that she can't quite hear, words that were tripping over each other in his haste to get them out as quickly as possible.

The young man looks at her. "Let me guess, is this your first love?"

She smiles. "Something like that, if you can call it love, which I don't."

"What do you call it then?"

She pauses, continuing to look at the laughing boy.

"It's something like this. You meet people who make you feel alive and breathless, who make you laugh and who you enjoy being with. But these people, they are transient, ephemeral, like the life of a butterfly, because they don't stay, and they won't stay. I call these people butterflies. And my feelings that I had for these people, they're like the lights of distant stars, lights from billions of years ago."

He doesn't say anything in response to her but continues looking at her as she gazes at the holograms of the dancing girl and laughing boy.

The piano music grows fainter and soon comes to a stop.

She gets up from the ground, her hair touching the leaves. Brushing her hair, she says,

"Well, now that the music has stopped, I must go. I wonder if the music had any lyrics."

He looks up at her for a moment and then takes out a piece of paper and pen from his manila folder. He quickly scribbles something on the piece of paper, folds it in half, and hands it to her.

"These might be the lyrics to the song we were listening to. Or something like this."

She takes the piece of paper and opens it, reading it. Folding it in half again, she puts it in her pocket.

"I didn't know you were a songwriter."

He shrugs, "Just an amateur one."

She smiles at him and says, "Maybe you'll write me a song someday." She turns and walks away, her silhouette casting a shadow over the leaves on the ground. He looks at her figure in the distance until it disappears, and then he goes back to reading his book.

-

I met you in the place between dreams,

Where memories of lost loves play in the distance,

The sight of you made my heart aflutter,

And I wondered will I ever see you again when I wake up.

I never said goodbye, but I will say hello.

XXX-XXX-XXXX