January is over. During “the Monday of months,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald once opined, Seattleites vacation to colonized climes, unlike Si’ahl, where land acknowledgments before Zoom meetings absolve. White supremacy often masquerades as white allyship.
Weather talk perpetuates a first-month narrative rife with doom: seasonal affective disorder, rain, cold, darkness, and post-holiday anti-climax. Our selfish minds do all we can to control nature and, similarly, ourselves. Instead of feeling January, we deny it. And in that denial, we repudiate ourselves.
January is a jaundice-lit municipal tunnel from December to spring. In Zombie Island, Roni Horn says, “Roads lack dedication.” She alludes to the road as a denier of place, expedient, a destroyer of the present moment. January is this.