A single calendar page slips free, escaping through a small apartment window. Its rigid grid of numbers, only a few moments ago fixed firmly on the wall by a rusting nail, whirls upward—soft and weightless in the wind.

This is how July finds itself wafting in the air, grazing the branch of a tree. 

Leaves at this time of the month are at their peak for photosynthesis: deep green, vibrant, and eager for the sun. All but one—seized by the wind's touch and carried down. 

As the leaf falls with July, light spills across its veins, warm and golden. So brilliant, beautiful, and useless now. But that warmth never reaches the ground. 

The sunbeams halt on their descent from the sky, and so do the clouds passing by. The wind stops howling, to lend an ear, and the birds freeze mid-flap as the river stills itself into glass. There is suspension even in the rustling of the grass and the blossoming of the flowers. 

In that suspended moment, the whole world leans in. 

Because suddenly… the leaf knows.

It sees not only the calendar page, but everything that it contains: the months, the days, the numbered boxes, the names given to holidays, the red circles around promises and obligations. It feels the burden of deadlines, the pressure of plans, and the fitting of life into grids and squares—into a single sheet of paper.

Then, the leaf fathoms how the forests turn to paper; factories where pulp is pressed and flattened down. It knows of the workers bent over machines, and the long hours burned into their shoulders and backs. It understands the hierarchy that governs them: some hands raw from overwork, while others never even lifting a finger. Except to put the fruit of labor into their mouths. 

A machine hums in the distance, an industrial vibration reaching out and calling the leaf by name. The hum draws it into knowledge, forcing it to bear more of the weight of civilization: The histories, and the vast constructs that govern them– the shipping networks that stretch across the expanse of oceans, the stores lined with goods glowing under artificial light, and the relentless flow of money. Oh, the money. The counting. The taking. The hunger of it all. The greed that shapes not only their world, but their very understanding of time.

All this knowledge surges through the leaf’s veins, the way only sunlight ever has. These impossible institutions, these systems and structures, constructs and conflicts—beyond anything it should ever understand.

And in that awareness, it wonders.

Who pressed their finger down on the beating pulse of the world and paused it for a leaf? And is there a force, greater than all I have just seen, that even humans cannot understand?

But just as quickly as it had come, it left.

And the world exhales, leaving no trace that it had ever paused at all.

The two objects continue their descent. The leaf sinks, its veins now humming with nothing more than the first few notes of decay, while July flutters away, its letters and numbers beating like frantic wings.

But across the street, in a small apartment, a calendar hangs open to August,

oblivious to the leaf that understood everything, before it turned to nothing.