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.