In February, I had just quit my job and decided I could live off of savings in my cheapie apartment until I found another job that wasn't degrading and annoying. Then I started waking up with splitting headaches.
In Seattle the temperature rarely drops below freezing, but there had been a cold snap. I'd been running the furnace more than usual and sleeping in when I would have been getting up and going to work. The turn of the century farmhouse had a coal furnace retrofitted to burn heating oil and when I woke up nearly vomitting, I became aware that it was poisoning me.
That started a long saga of accusing my landlord, calling in the dogs, getting evicted because I was living somewhere uninhabitable [thanks, City of Seattle], an intervening earthquake, and couch surfing for week and weeks while the city completed their paperwork and I dragged my sleeping bag to warmer homes with safer heat.
I had to move but got $2000 for my troubles and started remaining in motion. Moved some furniture and large posessions to Vermont, moved in with a friend in Seattle who gave me a break on rent since I was never home. Drive cross-country, back, out again for weddings, back again for more weddings and back one last time to escape San Francisco where I had been grounded after a flight that was supposed to leave 9/11.
The movement made me happy, and it made me creative. I started writing again, I met a fella, possibly due to the big grin on my face. I learned to appreciate the people in my life because they were the main constant, the places were always different. And I learned, I think, to tread lightly on the earth [through being almost forced to] and appreciate things that had previously been to me almost intangible: warmth, a soft place to put my head, a pen and paper, my health and the health of those around me, and the kindness of strangers and friends.
jessamyn 1 Jan 2002
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| February, 2001 was a rather strange month. At the beginning of it I experienced snow for the first time. I loved it. I can still remember looking down at the folks standing near the cabin and hurling snowballs at them from the edge of the basketball courts that sat right above the boys' cabin. (I went with my youth group - the guys had their own cabin, of course, the girls had theirs.) It was the last day of snow camp, and I didn't want to leave. It seemed like the biggest snowball fight of the century.
Fast forward about fifteen days, and you'll tune in to a special birthday party for an equally special old man who had just turned 92. He used to take us to his sister's on the train when I was four and my cousin and sister were three (the three of us hung out a lot as kids, and still do sometimes as adults). I remember all the candy he used to sneak into our hands when my mother wasn't looking. I remember all the times he led the prayer during family altar every evening. Who knew that a day later he would be in the hospital fighting for air, fighting to keep his heart going? The next afternoon, he was gone. Just like that.
As I said, February was a strange month - full of laughter, sparkling white, tears and eerie silence. But family unity was regained, and comfort and love were in plenty.
Sarah 4 Jan 2002
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In February I began my first spring on my own. Away at college, as far from reason as possible, I also fell in love with a gay man. Seeking the same inspiration, one concentrated in beauty and flushed from the last cold winds of winter, our relationship intensified. We kept odd hours, all spent with each other, tried new drugs, took a lot of road trips. We began doing things we never would have under normal circumstances. Once we applied for jobs as nude models for college art classes, making 8.50 an hour, an unheard of sum in West Virginia. Just afterwards we celebrated with a bottle of Stolychinaya. Sometime towards midnight we decided to visit the mermaids of Inner Harbor, Baltimore, only 2 hours away. Sometime in the misted ships we missed our turn, inadvertently began heading north. As I slept the prince drove through Philadelphia, numerous tolls on the NJ turnpike, only to wake me up at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel at 4am. We smoked the last of our only joint, lit Parliaments, and raced through Central Park, only giving in to sleep after I became ill on the sidewalk. Woke up the next morning like something out of a movie, our romantic epic, and dashed off in the cold to Wagner's Cove in Central Park. As things became eery, quiet but displaced, a sudden realization, like that of a panic, an instant understanding, caught us mutually off guard...we ran away the cove. Went to Washington Square Park to boywatch and listen to some old crazy teaching swordfighting in the defunct fountain...ate oranges...took a photograph...leaned out over a railing to stare at a red lit Long Island sign...sighed, cried, UN building hovering over us, and wrapped into his shoulder on the bench and kissed him. Because in this particular February, week of midterms and a certain saints day, Josh taught me that anything was possible.
Cheyenna {chey7830@aol.com} 7 Jan 2002
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| In February my grandmother died.
I painfully watched my father and uncle go through all of my grandmothers things. Watched them find the dress she wanted to be buried in, with a note pinned to the sleeve, a lock of her hair and a picture of her in an envelope, so that the caretaker would know how to make her look.
I watched my dad take the mantle of the family. I saw him grimace under it's weight and implications, and bury his mother.
One {one@absquatulate.com} 8 Jan 2002
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i was laid off from my job of 9 months on february 2, 2001. to me, it was the end of the world....my job -was- my life. my entire existence rested on the 40 hours a week i spent in front of a computer screen waiting for people to call me with instructions on their mutual fund accounts. i had just a year of college majoring in graphic design under my belt which could barely even get me a job at a fast food joint, let alone something that could pay my bills. hopelessness was the prevalent feeling that month, with only the thought that in a few short months i'd be broke....penniless....homeless....i'd have to eat my cat. and then, a month to the day after i lost my job, i got an offer at a similar company with the same pay.
it's funny now that i think back on it with the events that happened on september 11 in mind. hopelessness is all a matter of perspective.
reb 18 Jan 2002
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| In February, I learnt to let go of my love. Not knowing to love is to have or not to have, but I learnt not to have it. Give it away, give it away.
Camelia Keche {simprug@iinet.net.au} 21 Mar 2002
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2001 was a very important new beginning year for me since year 2000 was basically dreadful. In year 2000, I lost my first relationship. I was dumped. I was a wreck. And then, my dad had cancer.
But 2001 was a new beginning when my dad has his new life after a successful surgery. And I also had a new relationship which eventually led to a happy marriage in 2003.
When it's the bottom of the rock, you wonder why you're there and how you could survive another day. When you're 3 years down the road, the experience is almost a faint memory. But you know what? Life definitely taught you to become stronger and wiser. And I like it no other...
Daniel Poon {daniel@ourmelody.com} 9 Apr 2004
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