Lost to February

Oh, February.  You are a formidable foe.  You bring daylight back one excruciating minute at a time and while I know I should be grateful, I can feel in my bones that you are here to finish me off.  Or, if not me, the parts of me that winter set its sights on this year.

Two leaves clung, impossibly, to the tops of my branches all season long.  All through November, when the rest turned blazing colors and sparked triumphantly into the wind like fireworks.  Through December, when the snow came, a frozen blanket urging them to fall to the sleeping ground.  Through January, when harsh gales bright with shards of ice tore at their edges and bore holes around their spines.  Still, two leaves clung on for dear life:  forbearance and optimism.


And they nearly survived you, too, February.  But you were sneaky.  You knew all you had to do was come.  And wait.  And stand between winter and spring.  And pretend, with your smaller size and your tiny gifts - a lighter scarf, a wash of blue in the western sky at the workday's end - that you were a friend.  But my forbearance and my optimism were exhausted and you knew it.  All you had to do was be there to watch them surrender.

And so they have fallen, and so I face my dear life without them.  And the reality of my life (of existence) is that, truly, I have no idea what I am doing.  I don't know where I am headed or why.  I look down at my feet and know that if I call the patch of ground beneath them a path, it is because I am terrified to admit that I am lost.  I don't know what it is I am doing here, a mote of life clinging to the side of this tiny blue planet, pretending to matter.  And yet, for as slight as my significance is, I have caused so much damage in my few, fumbling years.  So much pain, above all to those I least wanted to hurt.

If it were all just an elaborate joke, it might be comforting, if only to know that a joker stood behind it all, smirking.

But even you, February, are nothing.  Intentionless.  I give you a motive so that I can blame you, because that's what we do.  But I see you, too.  You have no face.  No desire to win.

But you have, all the same.

Thank goodness for Dar.



(Since Stu & I are doing our first ever acoustic TBH show next Thursday at The Amory - with Magen from St. Helena and Sophie from Highly Personal Trash -  I thought a moment with one of my  favorite contemporary folk singers might be appropriate.

A plug at the end of a self-indulgent, flowery existential rant is really silly sounding, huh?)