Tortured prose to follow, good links at the bottom, I promise!
(One of these Februaries, I'm not going to be writing about this kind of thing. If you had asked me in October, I'd have told you that would be this February, because I knew I was no longer hurting over the things I had been hurting about in prior Februaries. That, technically, is still true. That old hurt is healed. As summer settled in, it looked quite convincingly like heartbreak would be entirely off the February menu. I was even grateful for past Februaries, because they got me to this way better person and this way better thing we were doing. So there's some emotional whiplash here.)
Right now I'm drafting the post for the 15th on the 14th, because it feels rich and ready. I'm sitting at my friends' house, where for the next two days I'm babysitting their 2 year old daughter while they are on vacation. They have never left town without her, and my friend is expecting another baby in a few months, so like, this is it. I was honored they asked me to watch their daughter, and all too happy to send them off. I was especially happy that my gig would start on the 14th, because in case my charge wakes up terrified or needing some Tylenol or just otherwise wondering what the hell is going on, I'll be ripped from the clutches of this stupid "holiday" and forced to think about something way more important.
I'm not so wracked that it's Valentine's Day, per se. But it is my ex's birthday; that just adds a certain...something. I remember when it first came up in our relationship, and I expressed sympathy about it. He's the type who wouldn't care about Valentine's Day, but has to deal with it falling on a day he'd probably like to celebrate unencumbered by superficial distractions. My birthday is Christmas Eve, so I relate to not wanting to share the day with something that's significant to everyone but me. But I thought, "It's probably great to date someone whose birthday is February 14th, because it can JUST be birthday." It's a great diversion of superficial emotional attention to a truly worthy cause.
I still got to do that sorta; today was Shabbat, and there's no worthier cause in my book than praising G-d for a day which represents total completion in the Universe, a day when I act as if life, as it is, is precisely what it is supposed to be. Of course, that's always aspirational; Shabbos is a taste of the World to Come, only a gesture toward completion. Today my rabbi's son, age 6, asked me if I would walk him home from shul. I told him to check with his dad. My rabbi came back over with his son and said to me, "I think Hoshaya thinks he has a G-I-R-L-F-R-I-E-N-D." I replied that he could do worse. So I took him by the hand and we walked home. On the way, I noted that he had snagged two brownies on the way out the door even though I had expressly limited him to one, and he said "Uh oh" while the chocolate melted all over his hands, but I had a napkin at the ready because sometimes I do things just right, and we played red-light-green-light but he'd call the "light" so fast that I was always running the reds, tripping on my skirt, laughing my way to our game of pick-up hockey, and telling him that "one more time" really means ONLY once more. "Hoshaya thinks he has a G-I-R-L-F-R-I-E-N-D." Maybe for the Valentine's day Shabbat of my ex's birthday, this was not so incomplete after all.
But I still hate it, because everything that fell apart those months ago is still falling apart inside me with that low-grade constant ache, as it does. February hasn't actually felt particularly more troubling to me than January, or than December before that. But I guess coming upon my ex's birthday smack in the middle of the month adds a certain sting that only February knows how to provide. After Shabbos, I logged onto Facebook to see (and rigorously analyze) the birthday messages populating his typically sparse wall. He and I don't speak, we have only once since he left me and it got ugly, which was something I never thought anything between us would ever get. Even a birthday email these months later wouldn't be appropriate, which is insane when I think about how had things gone only slightly, slightly differently, we'd have gotten married. I can't tell him how happy I am that he was born, so I'll tell you all instead: major gift to the Universe, this man; on the worst day, of the worst month, there he is, all 6 plus feet of his intensity and seriousness which might have even surpassed mine ("Who says you're too intense? You're doing just fine over here, babe"), all that blonde hair (but not much of it, if we're being honest) and blue eyes and smile that takes up his whole face, all that loneliness he's used to, all that post-court whiskey habit and hand-rolled cigarettes and excellently tailored menswear and custom-made shirts and shoes kept in shoe trees and expert record collection and old-fashioned shaving habits and pristine apartment complete with drum set looking out over the east river and black motorcycle and stellar dance moves and yiddish just good enough to have a half-way decent conversation with a senile old man on a street in williamsburg, all that humble brilliance and patient curiosity, all that quiet wisdom and love of all things old and mystical, all those lines delivered at the perfect moment except for that one time, all that deep passion and gentle strength--what an outrageous blessing the World somehow lucked itself into for the 36 years he has been in it.
Look, it hurts more than any of the others, but I'm also somehow better at it than I ever used to be, which is something I've been thinking about a lot this February. I didn't know how to mark whatever today is or meant to me, how to acknowledge everything it carried with it. The best I could do was put on this necklace he bought me. I had stopped wearing it after he left, but then started wearing again. Because it is beautiful and it is mine and it is what I have and I think it's okay to give yourself permission and I think it's brave to work with what you have.
Here's what else I'm working with:
--This amazing video of some of hip hop's greatest MC's sitting around a table, casually doing what they do (Mos Def is always my favorite but I think Big Pun gets the best of him here).
--Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
--Anything written at the-toast.net, but this in particular.
--This great 10th Circuit opinion.
--My favorite Hafiz poem, the message of which I did not heed carefully enough with my ex to secure myself a better February, even though I knew it was the instruction I needed, but I was too scared, which I never am, so now I read it every day:
Out
Of a great need
We are all holding hands
And climbing.
Not loving is a letting go.
Listen,
The terrain around here
Is
Far too
Dangerous
For
That.
That.
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