February felt like a long hug.

If February lived in a typical Nigerian face-me-I-face-you apartment in Lagos where the bathroom is shared by 17 tenants and the toilet always has someone in it, whether a father or husband offloading his gut before heading out for the day or a son with running bowels from the agidi he ate for supper. February would be that neighbor everyone loves.

It would be Chibyke, the young guy in Room 4, the one with a mosquito net door and speakers as loud as the trumpeters from the church behind the apartment. It would be him; the wannabe musician who’s actually excelling at making connections. The one the neighborhood girls like to visit, not just to listen to his music, but because his room is where they can charge their phones.

February came to me like Chibyke, the guy in Room 4, with a toast to being a volunteer at the cancer awareness talk hosted by the DORKAS Foundation in Oxford, United Kingdom. I volunteered as a health professional, stationed at a? table for blood glucose checks. When my pastor brought me the opportunity, I jumped at it without thinking twice.

I smiled a lot that day, excited by the fact that I could volunteer and help make a program successful. The keynote speakers knew their onions well, they delivered with fine precision, making their message easy to understand and relatable.

A few days later, February dropped me some sweetness. I woke up on Valentine’s Day to an Apple Pencil from my man. The previous month, he had gotten me an iPad to make my life easier because I’m a “productivity girlie.” That gift felt like an easy slide of eba down my throat. It fit perfectly into my needs and made writing super easy.

If February were a first kiss, the 14th tasted like strawberries with a salivary glide through our tongues. My thanks to my man didn’t come without our tongues meeting.

One day, on the 22nd of February, I set up my phone camera and recorded a video titled “This Is Your Sign to Start Journaling.” I never would have imagined that, with less than a hundred subscribers on my YouTube channel , I’d meet a friend from the other side of the world, someone who thought my video, with fewer than 50 views, was the best thing since the discovery of fried dodo.

He left me a long comment detailing how eloquent I sounded and how I had motivated him to start journaling. We bonded in the comments section, and he subscribed to my channel. I love it.

I love this life of consistency I’m building—that even when I don’t see the metrics I want, I’m still at it, pushing with determination.

I love February. It was love at first sight, and it felt like everything a man like Chibyke would do for the love of his music. I built consistency with my YouTube channel, wrote three articles for my LinkedIn newsletter, attended one volunteer event, let my man spoil me silly, did a fantastic job at work, cut down my screen time by 50%, read eight Substack articles, and rang my mama almost every five hours with gist and hot takes.

February felt like village love. It was a long hug.