The sun lies low and warm on a horizon heavy with grey rain clouds
Love ends
Life continues
The sun sets and the insects drone and the frogs sing
The dawn follows apace and the birds take up the tune
It’s a brand new day
With love or without it
As it should be
Love, February
Let\’s talk about the real things.
Let\’s be honest.
Love February is nearly over and by now you\’ve realised that I have no love.
What I\’ve realised now is that I am not alone.
I am not a lonely voice of Love(less) February.
And despite our best efforts – of funny anecdotes and music and autumn leaves and lonely vistas – the underlying pulsing beat remains the same.
Someone said we were melancholy.
I am not sure I agree.
Melancholy is an afternoon perched looking out at the rain.
Melancholy is the wry sad smile at tumbling pets because we see the joy but cannot feel it.
Melancholy is a moment of almost-enjoyable sadness.
To me, what\’s behind Love(less) February is something rawer, something more painful; something less sad and more stricken.
It\’s grief.
Collective grief.
Grief that can barely speak its name, is incapable of speaking its name.
A grief so existential it manifests from everywhere and nowhere; a terrible answer looking desperately for the question. Because a concrete, definite cause would enable us to name it, control it, wrangle it. Not conquer it. But live with it, tamed, as we work through it.
A grief we can box and label.
A grief we can name.
But our grief is as slippery as it is terrible. And real. And universal.
I put my pen to paper to write that we have no love because all we have is grief.
But I stop myself.
What is grief after all?
Is it not the loss of love?
The hole within us?
Do we not love the thing that is now missing, the thing that slipped from within us, the thing that caused this aching emptiness that we call grief?
Do we not love the Earth that is dying?
Do we not love the children that are crying?
Do we not love the victims: of fires and floods and viral strains, of camps and cruelty?
If we did not love, we would not grieve.
So grieve, my friends.
Continue grieving.
When you stop, when you are blissfully numb, that is when you truly will be out of love.
That hollow pit still cries to be filled.
That\’s how you know you\’re still alive.
And loving.
Love, February.
My father sends me flowers for Valentine’s Day.
I think it’s weird but don’t say anything.
I don’t remember when he started but at some point they started arriving.
He’d hand them to me when I was in school but once I started working he’d get them delivered to my office.
Lovely flowers, they would gush, who are they from?
My Dad
I’d cringe.
It’s a bit weird, right? Isn’t this weird?
Still, I could never bring myself to tell him. I just thanked him and hoped that next year he’d forget.
One year the flowers came.
Lovely roses
(Mum likes roses, I don’t care about flowers. Dead plants that wilt. And I still think this whole thing is weird).
I pull out the card and read it and laugh.
I ring Dad.
Dad, what message did you put on this card?
He tells me. I laugh again, louder, and read aloud what he’d actually written
From the only man who will ever love you
We never speak of it again
The flowers stopped
Love, February
Sunsets over beaches
A memory
As the rain comes down
Washing all our pasts away
Love, February
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When I met you, I was young
But just old enough
You could be the kind of sweet that youth prefers but, as I grew older, you were able to show me different sides of you.
You matured as I did
In the beginning, not many people appreciated you like I did
I saw your worth
And now you are as popular as you deserve
Found everywhere, dressed for every occasion
You’re on trend
But for me who loved you from the beginning, I feel like you’re a secret I shared with the world
I lost nothing from everybody else’s love of you
So I’m not jealous
Just grateful to still have you by my side
Even in your new infinite variety
I can still turn to you when I need you
In summer when I need to be refreshed
In winter when I need to be warmed
In good times
In bad times
Thank you
I love you
Gin
Love, February
I don’t want to go to work today
It’s overcast and threatening rain
I want to sit inside and watch dramas and enjoy the rain when it finally comes
I don’t want to go to work today
I want to make a dark coffee with cinnamon and cardamon and eat even darker chocolate.
And as the rain falls I’ll turn off the television and sip my drink and stand watching it from my windows as it drives against the red dust around my windowsills.
I don’t want to go to work today
That rain is predicted to cause flooding. The parts of my world that burned will now slide away in chunks of earth and vegetation and I don’t even care because it’s not flooding yet.
Just so long as it stays cool and moist and the sky is low because of clouds not ash.
I don’t want to go to work today.
Work is about the future
And all I want for just a moment
Is to be here today
Love, February
They say that in the beginning there was darkness.
This is clearly not true.
In the beginning there is always light. The darkness comes later.
At the beginning of the universe, light burned so fast and so bright, its birth was incandescent, transcendent. We see the echoes of the light still when we look into the Void darkening around us.
In the beginning, we blink in the harsh glare; warm and safe and loved. Bathed in the glow of a juvenile bliss that lives on in our white-hot nostalgia.
In the beginning, there was light.
And then it faded.
And then there was mostly darkness.
But the light’s memory is still there, in echoes and small twinkling remnants, if you know where to look.
But it’s still just an echo.
If you think about it.
Like a universal memory of light.
You can squint and see its remnants.
But the light whose memory you use to navigate, to walk through the world without stumbling around in the deepening darkness.
That light is gone.
Love, February
Love, February is a strange beast. Especially this year when I nearly didn\’t participate.
Last year\’s entries are fun and often frivolous. When they were serious, they were serious in appropriate ways. I had love last year. I do not this year. I\’m empty.
But I\’m still here.
Today\’s piece maybe doesn\’t belong here but I chose it anyway.
I wrote it many years ago – more than a decade ago – and found it in a folder of old writing hidden on my hard drive. Moving files to new computers can unearth a million, dusty things.
This is one of them.
I guess that love is sometimes not enough. Or maybe it\’s just a cautionary tale for a time like now. Maybe it\’s neither. Maybe I just needed to put it out there.
Love, February 2020: Day 5
I am 30 years old, but when I was young I went to London. Of course I did, we all did.
London: land of the great Australian Rite of Passage. Others pierce something, slay something or slice something: we travel. But not to anywhere. No, we go to the land where they speak our language, drink beer, don’t know how to make a decent cup of coffee, and do drugs: lots and lots of drugs.
I am 30 years old, but when I was younger, hipper, happier, social, thinner, more alive, I went to London. It was very impressive, so everyone says, I went ‘by myself’. As though this independence is the true test of adulthood. As though we don’t really need others, even though we contradict this belief in every other aspect of our lives. I went by myself and I found, so many things.
I found a house to visit in, a house to party in and a house to live in. I found new friends, old friends, party friends and endless faceless acquaintances to drink with, dance with and forget with.
This photo is of myself, K and W, partying; this one is of me sitting on C’s lap after giving him the Tim Tam my mother sent him; this one is of W and I wrestling at Christmas; this one is of Alex dancing with L; this of all of us at the pub. Alex has the inevitable cigarette in his hand and his arm around me This photo is of the whole party-house gang, and this is of the night Alex and D paid me with wine to cook them dinner: D threw up in the living room.
This photo is of P and I dying Alex’s hair with red pointed tips for him to go clubbing. He would club all night and come home at 8am and make me tea in bed. He would take speed to dance all night and a joint to come down in the morning.
I am 30 years old but when I was younger, I had a friend called Alex who only seemed to be able to form a bond with those who could ‘have a good time’. His best friends did drugs, he was dumped by endless girls who couldn’t handle being second to his drug dealer, and his personality slowly changed until the friendly, easy-going person I knew became a self-absorbed bastard.
I am 30 years old but when I was younger I danced Sokkie in a Turkish nightclub with Alex. I had to take off my hiking boots and dance barefoot, but it didn’t matter: Alex was always a good dancer. If you ever want to hear of coincidences, hear of me running into him in the middle of a street in Istanbul.
When I was in Turkey, friends I had just met would ask me about my life in London and I would tell them of my lovely South African housemates: the hippie artist, the intense one, and the intelligent, honourable farmer. And then I would mention in passing those who came to the city to get lost in partying, the drug-fucked. When they met Alex they asked if he was one of my lovely South Africans. I had to say no. He was one of the drug-fucked.
The night before I left on my trip, he and others were doing cocaine off a mirror they took off the wall in the living room. I have never been happier or sadder that I didn’t live there. Happy because I could walk away and sadder because I wasn’t there to stop them when they started off on that journey. My friend, F, trailed out after me into the cold autumn air and told me she wanted out of there, she couldn’t stand it anymore. Their partying had turned dark and self-destructive and she now knew why I had refused so often their offers to move in with them.
I am 30 years old and yesterday I found out that my old friend Alex is dead. He sits staring at me from an old photograph but he is a younger, hipper, happier, social, thinner, more alive Alex, in London, so many years ago. My Alex was always going to get better. He was always going to go home, get a job, get married, get off the drugs of London and live the normal life we all want and need. We were going to meet up in some distant place, all of us from the same party crowd, laugh about the old days, discover South Africa and improve our Afrikaans. We were going to be people who lived.
He can’t be that. Ever.
I can.
I am 30 years old and yesterday I found out that my old friend Alex, whom I have neglected for several years, committed suicide after a long history of drug problems.
May he rest in the peace he never found in life.
Love, February
The day dawns bright but cool.
The smoke has blown away for now. The fires rage on but here it’s calm and the sun pokes gently through dappled leaves on evergreen gums rather than searing through strange skies of orange haze.
I cook breakfast and hug a cup of fresh hot tea curled up on the couch while the dawn turns into morn and it’s time to face the day.
I shower and change and laziness loses to the sweet summer air, the cool welcome breeze.
I walk to the tram; racing across the road in the last few feet, red light blinking, to jump on as it slides to a stop, pauses, then slides off into Tuesday with me on board.
I hop off and step quickly into a cafe. Hot and bitter served by a barista hot and sweet.
He brings it to my table himself, his hipster glasses and professional indifference framing his Korean Indie singer look.
I take a sip and pull out my notebook, the minutes ticking down slowly till my bus leaves and I’m due at work.
I pull out a pen.
I write.
It feels normal.
It is normal.
I take a deep clean breath of air and think
Maybe I can
Love, February
My favourite word, my favourite smell, my favourite feeling.
Petrichor.
The soft rain falling on the hard dirt.
The breaking of the drought.
The smell of renewal, rebirth, of life
both literally and figuratively,
Petrichor.
Now gone.
The drought continues.
The rain doesn’t come.
The trees and flowers shrivel and die and
Petrichor is nothing but
a distant memory of vibrant life
Petrichor is gone
both literally and figuratively.
Everything is dying.
The water dries up
The dirt dries out
The world burns
Koalas scream and
firefighters cry
The only smell is dust and smoke and ash
It’s no wonder I’m struggling to
Love,
February
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