The Blog of Fleeting
February has always felt different from the other months. Shorter, yes. But not smaller. If anything, it feels condensed. Concentrated. As if the calendar itself decided to speak more quickly and mean more.
There is something about a month that knows it will not last long. So, for this month, the theme felt obvious: Fleeting. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, fleeting means “lasting for a very short time.” But beyond the formal definition, fleeting is not simply about brevity.
It is about intensity. It is about something arriving fully formed, burning brightly, and leaving before you have time to prepare for its absence. February embodies that. It is the month most associated with love. With Valentine’s Day.
With pink and red and heart-shaped reminders to pause and feel something. And yet, it is also the month that disappears first. Twenty-eight days. Occasionally twenty-nine.
A built-in reminder that time does not distribute itself evenly. There is something almost poetic about love being housed inside the shortest month. Love rarely asks permission to arrive.
It does not check calendars. It does not wait for readiness. It comes the way winter sunlight does. Sudden, slanted, and startlingly warm against the cold. And just as quickly, it shifts. Not always in loss. Not always in heartbreak. Sometimes simply in transformation. In evolution. In the quiet way feelings deepen or soften or change shape. Fleeting does not always mean gone forever.
Sometimes it means passing through. February carries that tension beautifully. It begins in the heart of winter. Stark, bare, cold. And yet it is often where we first sense the coming shift toward spring. It is the hinge.
The breath between. And then there is the leap. Every four years, February quietly adds a day. A single extra offering.
A small defiance of its own limitation. A reminder that even what is brief can expand. That what seems fixed can surprise us. That feels like love too. Brief, bold, beautifully timed.
Borrowing hours. Borrowing heartbeats. Leaving its imprint even when it cannot stay. What strikes me most about fleeting things is how deeply they mark us.
A short conversation that changes direction. A moment of clarity that rearranges perspective. A relationship that lasted months but altered years.
Length has never been the sole measure of impact. Sometimes the shortest months hold the most concentrated meaning. Sometimes what lasts only briefly strengthens us in ways the longer seasons never could. February does not apologize for being short. It does not try to stretch itself thin to match the others. It arrives. It gives what it gives. And it leaves. And then, eventually, it returns. There is comfort in that rhythm. In knowing that even what disappears can reappear in new form.
That love, like the month, has a way of stepping back from behind its winter curtain. Brief. Bold. And beautifully fleeting.
Poem of the Month
by me
A Leap like A Month
Fleeting the way that love comes in unbidden,
arriving with frost still caught in its hair,
the shortest of gifts, half-given half-hidden,
gone before you could say it was there.
It does not ask permission to enter,
it counts out its days on uncertain hands,
it burns at its brightest in the coldest of winter,
then melts before anyone quite understands.
Fleeting, the way it first touched without warning,
a breath between two longer and emptier years,
fleeting like light on a pale winter morning,
fleeting like laughter that surfaces through tears.
Love leaps the way a short month leaps
not asking the calendar’s blessing or leave,
it borrows the hours it borrows the sleeps,
it gives you just enough to make you believe.
Fleeting, yet fuller than anything longer,
the way that a flicker outshines a dull flame,
what lasts only briefly can still make you
stronger,
can still make the world feel entirely changed.
Twenty-eight heartbeats and then it is over,
or maybe this once it is given one more,
a leap of pure grace, like a hand on your
shoulder,
a single day extra, unlocked like a door.
Fleeting but true. Fleeting but certain.
Fleeting like everything worth keeping near.
Love steps from behind its own cold winter
curtain,
and just like the month disappears, then
appears.
Love as the month brief, bold, and beautifully fleeting.
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