February's Post-it note art from Instagram

Over on our Instagram page, we’re posting a weekly installation from Clare Johnson’s Post-it Note Project, a long running daily project. Here’s her wrap-up and statement from February's posts.

February's theme: Song Lyrics

I have no problem with the weather or the dark this time of year — Seattle's coldest cold is nothing compared to other places, plants start changing early, and in February I always feel the air softening in this strange way. But I find myself bracing for terrible things to happen. In my teenage years, it was just being dumped, ordinary heartbreaks. As I got a little older, February turned into the time when I lost people for real — lots of deaths, also my divorce, which ended a whole life I'd had in another country. The first death was a close friend who died suddenly our junior year of college. She was the first friend I made there, and we bonded over music-hosted a weekly radio show together, one of the most perfect things in my life. The last time I saw her we were burning dozens of CDs for each other before leaving for study abroad; I listened to them obsessively on my own in London. Every year I think I about all the albums that have come out since she died, bands we loved breaking up and reuniting and making brilliant things she'll never hear. It's been 15 years, and I'm not really friends anymore with anyone who knew her; it's hard to find ways to memorialize her right. So this month I chose post-its that quote song lyrics-from Confusion The Waitress by Underworld (all the nights up late listening by myself); We Used To Be Friends by the Dandy Warhols (teenage me at Bumbershoot; grown-up me watching Veronica Mars episodes after my divorce); Two-Headed Boy by Neutral Milk Hotel (but I got the lyric wrong somehow); and Give Up The Ghost by Radiohead (like they folded all my Februaries into a single, perfect song). Two of these she never got to hear.