Ella Peirce

This is my third annual birthday column, and it’s weird to imagine I will only write one more.

“You seem like you would have a February birthday,” she says, unknowing that I turn 17 in three days—by the time you are reading this, I will be. She makes me a scrapbook page adorned with light pinks, and I feel loved in the way I always wanted to be.

I want 1,000 more birthdays; not for the love of cake or cards or candles, but for the promise that I will have 1,000 more years of Februarys to describe.

I want this month, preserved in a box of love letters and dried flowers, to last. I want to walk out of volleyball practice to the sunset, I want to find rock bottom and lay comfortably on the boulders, I want to feel despair surround me and go to sleep anyway, forever and forevermore.

A lot of people hate February. I used to, but somewhere along the beaten path, I stopped hating time for doing what it does best: tearing people apart and stitching them back together, with golden thread and the occasional flourish of a bow.

February is fake; a sweet facade with the sourness of grief at every turn, subtleties become deafening. It is just like every other month in a way—I am in love with something and too busy to exhale. February is lyrical; Each day I turn a new artist’s footnotes into hymns, worshipping some idea of life’s meaning that I will eventually kick myself for holding.

Is this how everybody goes through life? I find meaning in the bottom of coffee cups and then realize I got it wrong (again), and then I find meaning in the next moment of contemplation, hours later. Over and over I force myself to have an outlook, something to stick to like I am not enough by myself. 

Maybe that’s what February is. Another thing I stick myself to, another epiphany that crumbles momentarily, another star sign that will end up being a smudge on my telescope. February is the scapegoat for the good and the bad, the epitome of my inability to be myself.

I still love February, though.

Because this is likely another instance where I’m wrong (again). The facts remain the same: I was born on Feb. 13 with a vaguely heart-shaped birthmark on my forehead that still peeks through, a faded red, discolored, and discordant with the rest of my face. And a girl who does not know my birthday helped cure my debilitating lack of a sense of self with her discerning eyes. 13 is supposed to be an unlucky number, but I feel very lucky to be living this life.

In a year, I’ll let you know if I’m still stuck to February: drawing hearts in fits of boredom, my floral bedsheets, the aftertaste of the holidays, strung between sweet and sour, and falling in love with the rhythm of 28 days.