November’s always been a tricky month. September is about the quiet-but-pleasing reflection of Summer’s passing and the anticipation of the promise of Autumn’s gifts. October is about Marathon training and running, enjoying pumpkins, regarding the leaves alight in color and change, and, of course, activities involving laughter, deep red wines, hay, and apples.

November, though, has always held a strange place in my mind. Somehow Autumn’s quiet reflection has jumped to an almost-palpable anxiety and nervousness about Thanksgiving, Christmas, Birthdays, and a new year to it all. It’s as if we’re suddenly tired of it all and ready to move on to something else. I suppose I am ready to move on to new and different things – new seasons, new years, and new opportunities; however, I have a hard time moving forward if the past doesn’t make sense. And this year, with the sudden break of old relationships, the sudden beginnings of new ones, a looming graduation and its associated decisions, and I feel as if I am miles into the journey but without any knowledge of how I got there, where I am going, and why – all of the sudden – I am alone.

Something I respect about story-tellers and writers is their ability to find the metaphor that ties things in together. Time passes, people change. When the story begins, life is one way, then, by the time the story ends, life is another way. But the story-teller and the writer make it all make sense somehow.

My ambivalence regarding this month and the ending of things centers on a dearth of metaphors and answers. In my waning days of law school, in my waning days of my 20s, and as significant decisions hover above the horizon…I don’t know what any of it means. Which is to say, where’s the metaphor? How’s it all fit into a neat story?