February is a month for masochists.
This year is a leap year which means the winter is one day longer than it needs to be; we’ve already tired out all romantic metaphors for the bare landscape, those naked trees with branches like bony fingers clawing at a paper-thin sky, trying to pierce small holes for the light to break through.
If there is one thing this country does exceptionally, it’s bleak winters. After an afternoon of glassy rain we sigh and come home to unbutton our faces and hang our coats to dry –– a futile ritual because even the inside air is damp. We spend the rest of the week trying to ignore our wet sleeves and the gnawing white of cold bones.
Gas bills are too expensive and it’s clear that nobody can afford them because we’re all trying to be influencers now. Before I go to sleep I turn my electric blanket to the highest setting, and even though I wake to spidery patches of reddish skin on the underside of my legs, the top half of my body is still a wanting thing riddled with goosebumps and palms clenched into tight fists. Outside the birds go quiet before a mass of soundless clouds swell and press up against the windows. A pause, and then the night plunges in like a reckoning.
The problem with living alone is that you don’t have to give yourself over to the day if you don’t want to: if you don’t open the curtains then you can simply stay hidden behind the teeth of the open mouthed morning.
Last week the pale sound of a child singing from outside the window cut through the unborn silence of my apartment, and when I drew the curtains to look across my neighbour’s tilted wooden fence I caught a flickering glimpse of a young boy with a freckled face and a pair of cornflower-blue rain boots. He marched across the soft wet earth, swinging a yellow bucket of dirt from one end of the garden to the other and emptying its contents into a moon-shaped hole in the ground. His gaze was focused and his expression stoic, making it look like carrying all this dirt was his duty –– like an art form that only the maker would understand.
I’m sometimes sceptical of the ‘inner-child’ self-help philosophy, but I do know that when I see pictures of my younger self a pounding guilt shoots through me like pellets of lead and I have to look away. What I feel guilty about I'm not quite sure. Maybe it’s because I imagine her meeting me –– I wouldn’t know what to do if she didn’t like me. Maybe it’s because I don’t have the heart to pry apart her hands and give her this life of mine to carry.
I think she would’ve chosen differently. I wish I could do what she wanted –– I wish I knew how to let her choose. I wonder if she’d see the muddy riverbanks as an invitation and not an obstacle. I wonder if she’d treat a yellow bucket of dirt as though it were just as important as everything else.
The month reaches its crescendo and the air is so sharp it creates punctures out of warm breath. A man eats an apple on the train as we roll backwards through the Severn Tunnel and each bite reverberates through my skull like glass marbles being flung across a pinball table. I decide that must hate everyone because otherwise he wouldn’t be making everyone listen to the stringy pulp of his apple on this quietly humming train.
I meditate on whether I should cancel plans to see some live music with a friend tonight because I’m feeling less than human. My fingers are sore from pinching at pistachio shells only to be disappointed when there are only nuts inside and not solutions to my problems and I still haven’t found the exact Reddit thread which will give me an answer, and also I have too many photos on my phone: the sky; times when I forgot I had a face and times when I needed to perceive it from every possible angle; the tiled floors of underground stations in Montreal –– I need to stay home to sort through all this clutter and the rattling sounds disguised as thoughts. But then I remember that an unfortunate fact of life is that to leave your house in the winter, you have to leave your house in the winter. And if you are going to have a crisis of meaning, you should at least give it a soundtrack.
When I come home I sweep away the pistachio shells and wash the dried oats from the pan. Maybe the man eating his apple wasn’t a selfish misogynist who wanted to invoke suffering on every passenger: maybe he was just hungry. Maybe the problem is not my job, or the city, or this life: maybe it’s just February.
monthly offerings:
A sound:
Bristol library as it closes: The man who comes by with the bell. Chairs being dragged across the hardwood floor. Zips pulled and books packed away.
A snippet from a book:
The Abundance - Annie Dillard
A photograph:
Untitled, 2021 © Irina Rozovsky
A French word:
onirique - dreamlike
A song:
Thanks for reading! <3