What does this photo show? A young woman. Me. And the hand of our bishop placing a cross of ashes on my forehead while whispering, “Repent and believe in the Gospel.” He could also have said, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” There is nothing more humble than ash. It does not shine. It does not pretend to last. It simply reminds us that we are not eternal.

Lent begins this way, with a fragile, almost invisible gesture that recenters us. Returning to what matters. Remembering that everything is given and that nothing truly belongs to us.

This morning, I sat in Saint Pierre Church in the heart of Bordeaux. Tourists came in, spoke loudly, took photos. Their movement disturbed my silence and reminded me that this city, where I have lived for nearly fourteen years, never quite stops surprising me. One only needs to walk without a destination, to accept wandering, for Bordeaux to offer an unexpected turn, an ancient stone, a shifting light on the Garonne. The Sleeping Beauty deserves to be looked at with patience.

So I improvised a walk. I knew I would write on this February 28, though I did not yet know what this month had placed within me.

February began with waiting. A shared waiting. A decision suspended above us like an uncertain sky. The answer was delayed. I understood then that uncertainty can wear us down more deeply than the trial itself.

Then the month accelerated. Meetings. Quotes. Numbers lining up and forcing choices. The delicate art of saying no. The fatigue of trying to respond to everyone without betraying myself. Preparing for the future often means letting go of the ideal image we had of it, learning compromise, admitting that we cannot carry everything.

A door did not open. A project dissolved quietly, though not without disappointment. I could have stopped there. I did not. In the midst of those renunciations, a small victory appeared, modest and intimate. It reminded me that even the most discreet work eventually bears fruit.

Above all, I learned to think as two. It sounds simple when put that way. It was an inner revolution. For a long time, I carried my questions alone, resolved my doubts in the narrow space of my own reflection. My fiancé taught me with patience, without ever imposing, that a shared decision is not a weakened one. To reflect as two. To weigh choices as two. To accept that the other holds part of the answer I do not have.

There is something humbling, in the noblest sense, in that learning: recognizing that one is not self sufficient, like the ashes at the beginning of Lent. Love is not fusion; it is the patient adjustment of two freedoms choosing each day to respond to one another. It brought us closer where uncertainty might have divided us. My family was there, as they know how to be, without imposing, but never absent.

And now it is February 28. Two families around the same table. Eyes meeting, observing, slowly softening. Silences that matter as much as words. What until now belonged to our story gradually becomes a shared story. Our beginnings cease to belong only to us. They widen. They take their place in a lineage, in a continuity larger than our individual wills. It is not a grandiose event. It is stronger than that.

Today, something unites. Today, something begins.

This month was not spectacular. It was interior. I think again of the words heard last Sunday: “Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert” Matthew 4:1. It is striking that the first step was not to go toward the crowds, but to be led aside, before speaking, before acting, to consent to being stripped bare. The desert is not a pause. It is a womb. There illusions of control fall away. There the illusion of self sufficiency is undone. There we cease to believe we are the origin of ourselves.

February was, for me, a kind of desert, a space where certain certainties cracked, where I had to consent to my limits, where I discovered that true love is not measured by the perfection of decisions, but by faithfulness in uncertainty. Lent does not invite us to multiply performances; it calls us to become available. We do not heal unrest through abstraction. We pass through it in encounter, in truthful speech, in patience, in forgiveness.

And yet, February ends in joy. The joy of having gone through waiting without hardening. Of accepting that not everything depends on me. Of building step by step without haste. The desert does not remove us from the world; it sends us back to it freer.

I leave February more serene than tired, more united than scattered, more confident than afraid. March may come. I am ready to inhabit it differently. To read also my January entry.

Written by Aliane Umutoniwase