The eighth date is a funeral and a feast— the last tomatoes, bruised but sweet, the first frost stitching silver across the grass. You take down the summer wreath, hang up the bone-white gourds. Something in you is dying, something else is being born.

So you turn your collar up. You walk inside. You leave the door unlocked for the winter because you know now: every ending is just a dark room where the next beginning is waiting to be lit.

The second date comes with a clatter of dry leaves skating down the asphalt. You wear a sweater you forgot you owned, and the light tilts sideways after three o’clock.