Patrice Gopo is the author of All the Colors We Will See, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and All the Places We Call Home. She lives with her family in North Carolina, where she enjoys walks just after dawn and thinks a perfect day ends with ice cream. Her newest book, Autumn Song: Essays on Absence, was published last month.

We all live lives littered with what we leave behind: places we once lived, friendships we once had, dreams we once envisioned, the people we once were. Each new day we attempt to find a way to continue living despite the absences we experience because of loss and disappointment, injustice and inequity, change and the passage of time.  

Autumn Song: Essays on Absence invites readers into one Black woman’s experiences encountering absences, seeing beyond the empty spaces, and grasping at the glimmers of glory that remain. In a world marred with brokenness, these glimmers speak to the possibility of grieving losses, healing heartache, and allowing ourselves to be changed.

By Way of Explanation

The maple tree in my front yard tells the silent story of the passing seasons. The stripped branches of winter. The promising buds of spring. The thickness of summer, spine and ligaments cloaked in an endless green. On a humid September day, six months into a plague that clawed at everyone’s lives in different ways, I began taking a daily photograph of this maple tree. To ensure I remembered to pause and sit and take in the view, I set the alarm on my phone. Each afternoon, the insistent chime sent me out to the porch. I’d settle into the patio furniture while the rest of my household continued using our home as an extension of both work and school.

The flourishing tree—thousands of healthy leaves the size of my curled fist—crowded much of the view during those initial weeks of preserving the slow ache of change. A look to the left or right, though, might yield neighbors walking past or a car backing out of a driveway. A mother might push a stroller. A couple of teenagers might dribble a basketball on their way to the court. Within moments, the movement exited my limited frame, and I was left with just my tree—a tree not yet ready to relinquish the abundant spread of summer. As the temperatures started to cool, some days I’d sit on the patio couch for hours just as I’d done back in the long-gone days of spring. Mid-September marked half a year since I’d last visited a friend’s home or attended church or sat inside a restaurant or brushed past a stranger on the sidewalk.

The previous spring, I had begun to shape this essay collection. The terrible days comprising the early months of a pandemic that would reach further in time than anyone could then imagine. While a few of the essays in this book had existed for years— previously published or biding their time on my computer— that spring, I took stock of what I’d already written and what I’d only begun to envision. Much of the world around me seemed to slow down, and I let my thoughts slow down as well. I asked myself, “What do these essays together want to be?”

Perhaps there was something gratifying about exerting a level of control over my writing when each day served as a reminder of our lack of control over the events feeding that year. I soon saw with fresh clarity, however, that this sense of control over my writing was merely an illusion. In fact, the writing itself, the individual words, the work of my subconscious, all these elements had a say in what this book wanted to be.

The world continued out there, beyond my home and front porch. Months passing. Ice melting. River banks rising. Helpless infants becoming cooing babies. Children walking across the bridge to tweenhood. And I began to make progress on this book. In ways I struggle to name, a pandemic brought to me the sense of urgency I often need to excise an idea from my mind and put a project in motion. I could attribute this reality to various factors: the politics, the racial violence, the disparities in health care laid bare by the pandemic, the pause that inserted itself into life as my world seemed to shrink.

Looking back, none of these reasons feels quite right when taken in isolation. However, stacked together, they encompassed a more complete explanation. How fitting, then, that this unfolding book consisted of work I’d written in the past— sometimes years before— and new essays taking shape in the midst of global havoc. These essays stacked together encompassed a more complete reason for the existence of the separate parts. In a time of great absence and loss, a hub of absence revealed itself as the overarching theme. Absence in so many forms. Absence in dreams deferred and hopes not realized. Absence because of loss, heartache, and disappointment. Absence arising from injustice. Absence of physical places. Absence in experiences. Absence in memory. Absence of the life we used to live. Absence of the life we long to live. Also, the literal absences within the structure of some of the essays. The reliance on the empty spaces and section breaks to speak ideas as well.

Who I am at the time of compiling the existing essays and writing new ones guides this book. Even more, though, who I once was, at the time of writing older work, also leaves a permanent fingerprint on these pages. Each essay tells the story of the particular version of me I was when I wrote those words, a snapshot of an ever-changing human being. As a result, when I look back on some of my earlier work, I have a visceral desire to rewrite parts of those essays. I want them to more closely reflect the person of now, not the person of back then. I could certainly have revised and rewritten. However, over these months, I’ve discovered I want to leave these essays primarily unchanged. In doing so, I allow them to serve as both an artifact from my individual history and a contribution to the artifacts forming our collective history. And what a sweet epiphany for me to recognize that my choice to leave these essays by and large alone creates another interaction with the theme of absence. While I am writing these words now, the person who narrates portions of this book is— in some ways— no longer here. She is absent. (To stretch this truth even wider, I also acknowledge that by the time this book of essays reaches a reader, aspects of the person I am now, the person typing this introduction today, aspects of this person will no longer be part of me).

Ultimately, to preserve those older essays as they were is to preserve the memory of that part of myself. Yes, I have made a few slight alterations here or there. However, I have generally not gone back and reworked older essays to reflect the new wisdom, ideas, and perspectives now present. Rather, I offer a fluctuating view on absence and loss and discovering the stories within. Despite implementing these boundaries, I can imagine how I might have reshaped a couple of essays. Even in the case of more recent work, there’s often another thought or reflection or bit of information I want to add. A truth of this creative life is that we complete the writing, but we continue with the living. So, for some of the essays, I have included a short author’s note. I offer a glimpse at what has transpired since I wrote that essay, or I consider the impact the living has had on how I look back on the writing.

Each season bears the marks of change. Autumn, however, publicly smears that story on a canvas. As I sat on my front porch, I knew what would soon arrive for my maple tree, the radiance of color, the flimsy leaves fluttering in the wind, the crumbling crinkle beneath a passerby’s feet. In those first weeks, though, imperceptible shifts moved through the roots and trunk, forging ahead to the tips of branches. Shifts that would soon twirl the proximity of summer into the true signs of fall. All the while, the discrete forms of absence in the essays twisted together. Perhaps the accumulation of these absences spoke to the continual absence we all experience in the face of a changing life. Those early pandemic months, a time drowning in the unknown, seemed to heighten this truth we live out each day but often fail to notice. Absence may not be absence as we often think. Absence can be a form of presence emerging, telling a tale that invites us to consider life from another perspective. The presence of absences and empty spaces in the essays reveals the flashes of glory around us and in our lives. In a world marred with brokenness, these glimmers speak to the possibility of grieving losses, healing heartache, and allowing ourselves to change.

Six weeks after I started preserving a daily image of the tree, the first dash of red outlined a handful of leaves. Then, a few weeks later, all the brilliance and decay descended and reached near completion in approximately ten days. Overnight, it seemed, or more accurately over three nights, the leaves deepened to crimson and scarlet and finally a hint of wine. In technical terms, the tree ceased producing chlorophyll in preparation for winter. The disappearance of the chlorophyll revealed the pigment always there. To my eye, though, heaven poured out a can of paint, gushing over the leaves, saturating them in the picture I’d long been craving. Autumn’s distinct aroma, slightly sweet and full of earth, flavored each inhale. Over those ten days of transforming colors and falling foliage, the absence of summer green gave way to the absence of leaves. Together, these absences welcomed the presence of the next season.

By late November, I sat on my patio, capturing the image of a bare maple, this living thing gone dormant, hunkering down for the coming winter. The vacant branches gave me a direct view of the street, my neighbor’s house, the world beyond my front yard.