Late afternoon in a forest in autumn. A boy is standing with his head thrown back, looking up into the trees. He spots a large leaf spiralling down and runs forward to catch it. He holds the leaf in both hands and gazes at it thoughtfully. The next scene shows him carrying the leaf to a child’s school desk in the middle of the forest. He sits down, sweeps a layer of fallen leaves off the desk with one arm and smoothes out the leaf he caught. He finds a felt-tipped pen in the desk and begins to write on the leaf:
Dear
ground,
thank you for
always being there
for us. In my dreams,
sometimes you aren’t and
I go on falling until I wake.
Thank you for letting us sleep.
Thank you for your enormous
reserves of darkness, which
we have been burning to
keep the darkness at
bay, ashes to ashes.
Thank you for
letting us
all fall
down.
The voiceover is in a child’s voice at first, but after the word “sleep” it switches to the voice of an adult, and the boy turns into a white-haired old man at a full-sized desk, still writing on the same leaf in the same forest. The man takes the letter, folds it carefully along the seam, then again cross-wise, and keeps folding until it is an inch wide. He places it in his mouth, chews and swallows. He stands up, walks to a spot between the trees, lies down in a fetal position and closes his eyes. A time-lapse sequence shows his body being buried first by fallen leaves and then by snow, till he is little more than a bump. Cut to the final scene, in which the boy has just caught the leaf and is still gazing down at it. There’s an adult voice off-screen calling his name and saying that the park is about to close. He squats down and slides the leaf carefully under some other leaves, gives it a couple of pats, then stands up and runs off-screen toward the voice. Fade out as leaves continue to fall.
