I’m not altogether down on love, you understand. I want to make that clear. There might very well be love and there might, some day, very well be love for me as well. I suppose I should stop thinking about love like a gift apportioned by god. Love is not for Cupid to give. We are struck by lust only, hence Cupid’s pointed shaft. But love, no. Cupid cannot give it. This is what I mean: love is not given only. It’s when we are ready to give love and feel love that love might come. That’s enough of that.

I’ve never had a particularly good Valentine’s Day. I’ve had particularly bad Valentine’s days however. At eight, we made Valentine’s Day cards for our classmates and passed them around. This is about the same time little boys figure out that it’s not proper to give out valentines messages to other little boys; and also about the time that I might get one or two, say, from girls who, likelier than anything else, had borrowed my glue or were aware enough to worry that I might otherwise only get one or none. The other boys fared much better.

At twelve, there was a girl I liked quite a bit. At 22 she married one of my father’s farmhands. He was manly and dark. At 26 she left him. He was a drunk who treated her badly. But at twelve, I had gone to Sears and bought her an oversized valentine’s card. It had Ziggy on the cover. I figured everybody loved Ziggy. And, inside, my declaration of love, whatever it was, must have been so pure and earnest. At the end of that day, for all to see, in the refuse bin, was my Ziggy card all torn to pieces. I guess her twelve year old mind felt it necessary to refuse me as publicly, perhaps more, as I had petitioned her. In the same grade, she followed me to high school. She was even a freshman with me in University. She never apologized.

I think if I were in love, or if I were loved the way I want to love, I might ignore Valentine’s Day. Primarily because Valentine’s Day for lovers like Mother’s Day for mothers, is so entirely fake. I hate Valentine’s Day sentiment. I don’t at all mind the commercialization of Christmas. It is what it is. We revel knowing that it is fake. But I shall not ever revel in the fakeness of Valentine’s Day. Love is the best of our qualities. To have it distilled and rhymed and inserted into a card to give to someone is just grotesque and a little sick. I hate the dressing of Valentine’s Day: the expectations, the cheap sentiment, the dozen roses. It’s all so planned and so ridiculous. Expecting tokens of expressions of love is ugly. And giving them, for the reason that they are expected, is uglier.

Valentines Day was originally a pagan festival. As with nearly everything. The Lupercalia feast was created to honor the god Lupercus who would protect Rome from the hordes of wolves stalking and savaging the defenseless sheep. At this feast, young boys would draw the name of a girl to which he would be partnered for a year. There were no tokens of love and no expectations of love just a girl for every boy for a year and scared shepherds appeasing the God of Wolves.

With no god to appease and no name to draw,

SS