February is a notoriously saccharine, Hallmark-heavy month.
I prefer rich, complex, and bittersweet flavors.
Collective rituals are hard to come by within late-stage capitalism, and I think we often cling to these commercial excuses for pleasure and connection because we’re so starved for ritual. Honoring, remembering, and bringing close the love and pleasure in our lives through ritual is a worthwhile pursuit. So is honoring loss and grief.
To me, these feel like two sides of the same coin.
Surrounding myself in emerald velvet is my new favorite thing.
I really do have some incredible love in my life—
A-1, premium-cut, wild-caught love.
Hot, wet, messy, pussy-on-fire love.
Partners, companions, and life-long friends.
Intense flings and treasured clients.
Family I would choose over and over again, in every lifetime.
But to arrive at a place of having these extraordinary, abundant connections, I had to let go of a lot of the stuff that just wasn’t working.
Saudade: a feeling of nostalgic longing for someone that you love and lost. (Portuguese)
Loosing someone you love isn’t always a heartbreak, drama, or death. Sometimes it’s as simple as a misunderstanding, a change in your life path, a shift of values.
Sometimes you stop talking and drift so far away there’s no way back.
Nostalgia, memories, dreams, pangs of guilt— at times these burst in to haunt my mind and heart. But when I take the time to lay out some flowers, a bowl of milk, perhaps a candle lit for these ghosts…
the loss is not so heavy around my shoulders.
I write poetry to air out haunted corners and breathe life into important moments that ask to be remembered. To help bring some balance to an overly-sweet month, February seems like a good time to honor both present and past love, a good time to write a lot of poetry.
My poems, essays, and uncensored photos can be found on my Patreon page.