Episode 11: Dear February
Hi everyone, I hope you’re doing as well as you can be. This week’s poem looks at a moment of recognition that a familiar, intimate pain is coming—one that can make us more vulnerable to various forms of relapse. Through the personification of January and March, this episode is a personal one from me, exploring the pain of remembering a remembered bone-deep pain and what it’s like to prepare for it, such as the anniversary of a loss, birthday, death, suicide attempt, or the beginning of a sobriety journey. My hope is that the poem allows us to think about the question: “Why wade through the ache and loneliness every year?” Perhaps we were never alone to begin with. Perhaps we wouldn’t be stronger if we didn’t have to remember. Perhaps we’re stronger if we do remember, together, and fumble forward in a way we wouldn’t have been able to if we didn’t feel.
I’ll share it with you now:
“How do I prepare for pain
that my mind, body, and soul
remembers—knows is coming?
That particular re-pain?
The kind we have known
every creek and crevice of?
The apex of relapse potential,
of course, cuffed to the cage
of a month packing more
peaked, pointed punches in just
twenty-eight days than others
with thirty-one, as if saying:
stop fighting now—those three
years won’t change anything?”
January beseeches.
“What if I claimed February’s
time and space? Bring a sort of
death to it?” January asks again,
calmly now, thinking.
“Maybe more of myself
would bar me from the film
frame when I’m finally able to
crack open frozen windows.
Or take a final frostbitten shower—
one where my skin pickles while
the window is open and
the water is off throughout
lathering (to conserve water).”
I, March, nod.
“January, I know your waiting
isn’t the same as
November’s waiting—
where the joy is in the waiting
rather than the waiting for joy
to return. If it was ever there.”
“But don’t forget that
memory doesn’t stop
for death. Nor does the life
of relationship, as known
by looking into a face
and seeing the layering
of ancestral features
that built it.”
“You are built by your
eleven ancestors, and
catalyze the building of
the eleven ever after.
I am you.”
“But there is grief bursting my stitches,”
January cries thick, snow tears,
“a Lunar New Year, muscled, scaled, winged.
A best friend’s quarter-life birthday.
An aching reminder of absent love.
And a near taking of life,
not far enough in the past,
which circulates the bone
and flesh of every February.
It’s pain taped to a clock.
And it bloody hurts.”
“You feel alone, I know, and
that the road—a glassy waterway—
is too glassy to travel without
slipping; without falling
beneath the frost sheet that
locks you in without air.”
“All the more reason to fight.
All the more reason not to.
All the more reason to carry
a pickaxe to excavate what
either option means to you
when agony cannot be tamed
by my promise of spring. But,”
Let me share a bare,
un-sugarcoated secret—
a paradox if you will, from
a kindness named Stephen—
if you look long enough…
If you look hard enough…
at yourself, then suddenly,
you will see the rest of us—
humanity—staring back.
You were never alone.
Breathe the words in. What do they make you feel or think? How did they connect with your senses? What colours or symbols did you notice? What meaning did you draw? Metaphors? Interpretations? Clarity? Messages?
