shall I love you, said the swallow.

today I forced myself to start writing again. this is what happened.

image via Alexandra Sophie

January September named herself after the months of her grandparents birth. She found it curious how the month in which someone was born could posses such weight in the dozens of months that cycled through a year, even through a lifetime. July had always been the most important month for her, the meat of the paper calendar that she tore from its cellophane wrapping when each new year began. To January, July was the most promising, the most romantic and the most harrowing of all the months, but it was the consistent tumultuousness of these thirty-one days that eventually forced her to change her name. You see, within her home town everyone took the name of the month they were born in. She was raised as July, from that very first July to the final one that marked her death; though in her twenty forth July she adopted January September as an alias. Nevertheless, she lived eighty-six Julys, each one sweeping through her as quickly as the scent of new lilacs swept through the squares of a fly screen. Each sixth month, when the lilacs bloomed, the screen would take the form of her most prominent profile as she inhaled all she could of the ephemeral shrub. “How lovely it would be, to be called upon as June,” she would sigh in jealousy each year when the same branches began to burst with violet buds. And of course in a few weeks when these blooms went afield, she would lament over the terrible curse of the very same name, which retracted its gifts before your memory of the seasons reminded you to snatch up every last bit of lilac and capture them in the crown glass jars that sit in waiting for eleven months and one week of the year.