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.
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
I had a really bad day last year.
Well, to be honest I’ve had several over the last few months.
My Mum, my Dad, myself, the world.
All seemingly breaking down around me and I lost the will to fight anymore.
I tried to get up, tried to call out, tried to get out, but instead I cried and yelled and snarled at people on the internet and then I complained, loudly, to Beanies about my mental health.
I fired up discord and found a notification. Two. Three. Seven. Ten.
What was happening?
The maknae line had decided to cheer me up through random silliness.
Tagging me into every channel on discord; while the confused denizens of those discussions greeted me with bemusement.
“Just dropping her off here”, these comments said, as I was tagged into channels on kpop bands and other places I normally never went to.
As one did, so others joined in.
“My turn to tag her!”, the next one said as I got dropped off somewhere else.
And I sat there in my living room, my computer on my lap lighting up with notification after notification, I looked at their glorious crazy.
And I laughed.
Thank you, Beans
Love, February
\’Was that life? Well then, once more!\’
Is a curse greater than ‘May you live in interesting times’.
We’re stuck in Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.
Life on a loop, the same great curses repeating.
Will we break free in time?
Or will we simply spiral down
Collapsing into nothing
Turtles
All the way down
I wish I could Love,
February
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