February, a Short Story

It has officially been February for five days now.

This month used to have its weigh on me due to it being my birthday month. Alas, I had just now realised that it isn't only the reason for February being so formidable and crushing on my soul. I really had thought that turning a year older, completing another lap around the Sun, and expecting to find wrinkles and salt-and-pepper hair would be the most of my worry this month. But, as I have said before, it isn't. Not this year at least. I think there is something special about February this year. Something inevitable. Something that was decades in the making.

I can't pinpoint what it is exactly, but I think it has something to do with the guy whose eyes are as melancholic and as lonely as meadows during rainy dusk. It would be appropriate for him to come back this month, as it is our birthday month and the month when he went away. I'm not sure precisely when he will be back. Or if he will come back with my heart still intact, the same one that I gave away years ago to accompany him in his trip to a land elsewhere. I am not even sure if the guy that will come back is the same guy that went. I am even more unsure about whether I would want to see either version. I am fairly certain, though, that he will return soon—carrying an old epithet of mine perpetually unspoken in his lips and worlds upon worlds ready to be unfolded from his mind once his eyes reached mine.

But, perhaps, February won't carry only him. Perhaps something from the past would creep up soon. Something that I had left a decade ago, but I still bear my longing for being with it until now. Something that I never successfully purged myself from. Not because of its faults or defects, but because its main purpose was to help me grasp him again within my arms; like I once had a couple of years beforehand when we were still able to talk it so good and make it so divine. It would be appropriate for it to come back—carrying nostalgia, childish naivety, starstruck eyes, petrichor, and worn-out boots.

So, with reality turning itself upside down, I will stay here waiting for life to shed a light on a guy who went to the darkest deepest corner of the Earth and bringing him back in my arms for me. I will be waiting here, with a teapot of osmanthus green tea and three scoops of ice cream. We will embrace domesticity again the way we once did.