I cannot remember a time when January did not bring me dread,
I am, after all, a child of the new year, of deep winter, of power outages,
of “don’t be greedy for your birthday, it was only just Christmas,”
and other such memories that secretly made me wish I was a Spring Child
(Queue the laughter from my friends who read this,
who know with a glance and a stifled laugh that I’m no
Spring Child).
But ever since my mid-twenties, when life found fit to strip me of everything
EVERYTHING
that gave me reason to breathe in this cold January world,
I don’t know,
I grew fonder of the season, of the dark, of the wet-slick Michigan misery that is
January.
Remind me, what’s so bad about wrapping myself in a forgotten friend’s scarf,
sitting in my car in the darkness of the morning
blowing puffs of cloudy breath at the windshield,
pretending like I still smoked a pack a day?
Happy fucking birthday.
Discarded Recollections 