February: A Love Letter

Month of despair, excitement and horror.

From left: The Pink Rose, Federico Andreotti, The River At Sunset, Charles Guilloux, and text from February, a poem by Margaret Atwood.

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February. Haze of confusion. Fatigue, mingled excitement and horror—how Canadian poet Dorothy Livesay described these twenty-eight days.

February, month of despair, with a skewered heart in the centre, Margaret Atwood mused in a poem named for the month.

And then there’s Anne Sexton:

Do not rely on February (…) The sun in this month begets a headache like an angel slapping you in the face.

It’s true, the sun is less shy now, at least where I am. Skies are Freezie blue and cloudless. Everything is coated in either snow, grime, or salt—the roads, cars, our boots—but there is beauty to be found in the filth, the ordinary. February atones for what January lacked in magic. Icicles on the eaves become bejewelled, sparkling ornaments. A certain majesty is bestowed upon a mound of snow when lit by the sun. Your eyes play tricks. The snow becomes something else: it could be a tomb, a playground. (Or it could just be snow.)

Everything shifts in February. Even the innocent pink and red of Valentine’s Day decorations allow for us to disengage from the macabre fact that we’re stringing up human organs, that they’re being written on and traded by elementary hands. This is the month where we consume hearts, whether cinnamon flavoured and dyed in Red40, or stamped with phrases like kiss me or je t’aime. February is a barren month, why not have a little fun?

It’s around this time that we’re rewarded with sugar pink sunsets, colour that lingers. Lilac and peach tones stay in the sky until it all turns indigo, before eventually fading to black. Stars blink back at you in February, on these crisp, cold nights. Chickadees resurface, offering only a clip of song here and there so that we don’t become spoiled. Five weeks until spring. This month, sandwiched between the slate days of January and March (March, always unpredictable and moody in temperament—in like a lion, out like a lamb my mother says). Livesay and Atwood were right about this month. Valentine’s. In the midst of the season. With a skewered heart at its centre. All excitement and horror.

Get rid of death, ends Atwood’s February poem, Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.