Miko was a singer with her voice in the clouds. They called Miko blue. Occasionally, there would be flashes of red. In the fall, Miko would softly mimic the elegy of leaves and become yellow. She would, in voice and longing, die a yellow death and find herself settled among the tender mortuary of leaves.

   Lost leaves. Lost hours. Lost time. It’s what kept her searching. Not for a specific period in her life, not for a denoted passage. Not for a time she had known. It was the search for a time she hadn’t known. She wanted to find again the time she hadn’t known. It was saudade as ineffable reflux, as yellow panting for motley leaves and vagrant winds.

   I don’t know it, this unknown time, yet there is an inexplicable germinal quality to again in my finding it, an inalienable sense of return. Most returns are impossible, or revolve centrifugally around diminishment. Miko’s ghost, having advanced beyond her life at a young age, echoed back to her in song the invisible passages she must travel in tracking the lost hours.