Lately, I feel like "meaning" is just another promise I can't keep. I try my best to find it, and I want to find it, and I look for it, but while the thoughts inside my brain feel boxed, the world around me has never felt so vast and empty. Even the moon creates the loneliest echoes in my soul; how can I possibly reconcile a space for my mother in this life, when space beyond is so far away? When I look up in the darkness, the stars each whisper scientific formulas and alien languages that are probably trying to explain that I'm too young to understand, I'm too short to reach, and I'm too small to keep her spirit warm here on my own, under my hat. And so, in trying to grasp the most existential meanings, they seem more and more sparse, lost in the sky, lost at sea, lost within me.

Love. But that is an odd topic, love. All kinds of it. And love, the kind that you speak of, it both comforts and burdens me. It comforts me for it was handed to me in its purest form, from mother to daughter, from start to finish, from teaching to learned. Yet it burdens me in its quantities, the huge amount of it that was bestowed upon me, left in my hands, left in treasure chests that I raided all my life in sweeping movements. Now I walk the streets alone, love tumbling out of my pockets and hitting the ground, love burning my fingertips and the door handles I touch, love in my shoes, love in the CD player, love in my blankets. Love for my sisters and love for my cat, love for my colleagues and even ex-lovers. Love seeping from every pore, love in my eyes, love in the building and trees that I see. And I am burdened for it, for its invisibility, for its vapours, its intimacy that is untranslatable to others around, all dressed up in love and nowhere to go.

But, there is indeed promise in autumn. The smells of burning wood and rotting leaves is too strong and reminds me of the ground I walk on rather than the sun above. And so I am usually drawn to the center of the earth, this earth, this place in the universe where I exist, even if my mother no longer does. Ashes to ashes, except her ashes are in an urn on top of the fireplace. But no matter; when winter sweeps aross the land and freezes the bodies and sinks the ashes even deeper in the snow-covered graveyards, I'll sit comfortably by the fire and perhaps, instead of being sucked out towards cold space, or drawn to the burning core of the planet, I will have a glass of wine and not think of it at all.