A golden leaf flutters down beside me onto the table and I pick it up to discover a pale yellow shell of a spider. Hollow and transparent. Beside it, a filmy drop of web still holding onto its leaf and the spider’s carcass from which it was spun.

I think about how everything is like something else. How my stories will outlast me. That our web is stronger than we are. So it is no wonder how long and arduous the task to write a story. And is it really ever done?

And how lovely to think that these stories we spin are the means to carry us through.