February.

On the practice of keeping.

I start the month walking the galleries at Mia. It’s snowing outside and the museum is quiet. I sit along a wall of windows watching the snow fall. I write in my journal. I read Ross Gay’s book, The Book of Delights and am struck by a particular line: “…to communicate the beautiful and the fragrant however we can. To make the world a bouquet. Or a vase.” I turn these words over in my mouth the entire month, everything I see colored by them.

I end up going to Mia every weekend, always sitting along the same wall of windows. I keep returning to write. To find a quiet gallery, to find a piece I hadn’t noticed before. I keep returning as a way to grow familiar.

I keep waking before dawn to write with tea in hand. By now, it’s a practice I crave. The page a place to empty my head, writing anything and everything.

I continue to ride the bus to work, sitting on the east side on the way in, and on the west side on the way home. It feels like a particularly sunny month and rays cut through the windows, flickering across my eyes, bookending my days in light.

I feel the passage of winter, as I reach for my gloves less and less. I watch the days grow longer, stepping out each night to a lighter sky—from ink blue, to cobalt, to cornflower.

Last month, grief was so front and center, sat before my eyes and all I could see. It was like wading through a brush too thick, unable to get out from under it. Like being in the eye of a storm—the air heavy and thick, the real force hovering just beyond.

There was too much happening, I slipped into survival mode.

This month, the storm quiets and lands forcefully in my body. Not all at once, not all the time, but with fervor.

Its tendrils spread through my chest, sharp and pressing. I sleep more than usual. I return to my yoga mat again and again, stretching my body long, trying to tend to all the places it hurts.

My ribcage burns. Something tightens there and will not loosen. It spreads outward like heat, like something molten touching everything. I visit the chiropractor each week and I cry on the table. It feels as though grief stored is making itself known. Like the hurt is pushing against its confines, meeting bone.

I don’t think grief ever really leaves. It just changes rooms.

I am learning how to hold it differently. To place it, gently, into the vase alongside everything else. Not as something to overwhelm, but something to tend. Its contrast only making the joy more brilliant.

Some days the gesture feels meaningful. Much of the month it feels like a futile thing. Like such a small offering against something much too large. As the weeks pass, I lose steam. I feel a deep tired. And still I keep adding to the vase. More out of habit than hope. The muscle memory of the thing rather than the desire.

And so, I spend the month filling that vase, nudging myself toward practices that fill it stem by stem.

In the evenings I alternate between reading Mary Oliver and Ross Gay. The note on my phone grows longer, filled with fragments and words I want to hold onto. I jot down, “As if delight were the most serious thing you ever felt,” and “Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!” I write, “The sun today!” and words like shiver and scoop.

Joey and I take long walks. We often follow the creek, always sitting on the same bench. There’s a volley of birdsong overhead. We hear owls, too, and sometimes smell a faintness of smoke and ash.

He runs on the nearby frozen lake, a novel and utterly joyful thing for both of us. He breaks into wild, ecstatic loops, racing in circles across the ice. It is the most delightful thing to witness—a sudden arrangement of joy, bright and unruly, placed directly into my hands. Oh, to express the big and rowdy and uncontainable pleasures of the body. I see something bright added to the vase in real time.

I visit Easy Day often. Mid-month, temperatures climb and it’s sunny and 50 degrees. I sit outside at the cafe for hours, Joey at my feet. Live music plays and I write. It’s peaceful and perfect.

I join a community choir and it means more than I can say. We warm up singing, I am theirs and they are mine. The words ring through the room until it permeates everything, until it’s all I can hear. It’s like we wrap our voices around our sorrows. Like we wrap hands with another and hold tight. I leave each rehearsal feeling like something fragile inside me has been gently set back into place.

Still, grief keeps moving through the room. February carries echoes of January.

I carry parts of them with me.

I listen to Rolling Golden Holy over and over. I walk the halls of Mia weekly. I lay my blanket across my lap each night, tracing the wool through my fingers. Something like hearing, moving through, and touching the outline of a memory.

I keep lighting candles, keep going to memorial sites. I keep looking. Keep watch. Something like tending to the shape of what was lost.

Because of them, because of all this, something takes hold in me. Something like resonance, like something still sounding. And also like roots spreading, like a web binding.

I touch the ache, recognizing its cry: it happened, it happened, it happened. It mattered, it mattered, it mattered. And I hold fast to the part of me that chooses to stay wide open.

I think this month has been a search for chosen sites of attention. Small stabilizing forces. Stems for the vase. It’s a fragile keeping, often feeling frivolous or foolish. It also feels fleeting. Like I’ve chosen to bind hands with liminality. But the point was never permanence. The point is the tending. To doing it over and over and over again and letting things matter. To keep making, however I can, a bouquet. Or a vase.