Hello my fellows! A very special day is coming. Am I right? I sure am!
It is somehow aggressively poetic that Valentine's Day hits right in the middle of the year's coldest month. Mostly if you're in that frustrating state of being unwillingly single.
Everyone supposedly knows when they're in love, whether consummated or requited or no, and, as such, love has been celebrated and bewailed and pored over and cursed at in story and song for centuries of literate culture -- but for some reason no one seems to focus on the even more acute sensation of not being in it.
And everyone kind of knows how it feels. It's this depthless abyss-thing which no one but you can really see, although it feels painfully exposed to your friends. It's a sense you get late at night, from totally out of nowhere, while listening to music or watching TV or reading or lying in bed, a sense which insistently pounds in your mind and makes you violently aware of the passage of time and space around you. It's a dark, creeping, convulsive space in the pit of your heart, a void, an absence of something, waiting, wanting to be filled. You're not in love. You don't have love. Love does not have you.
And so Valentine's Day's cold temporal placement seems especially sadistic but appropriate, what with the fact that the day is a separate and specific "holiday" devoted to making those people who are in love feel a little better about themselves and their relationships by giving them all an excuse to shower extra love and affection and flowers and cards and candies etc, pushing into those legions of the population who are single or unattached (and therefore left in the emotional vacuum of the center of the freezing wet February chill) with emphatic reminders that those unlucky legions have: no Valentine.
And yet this is a beautiful kind of thing, this misery-inducing clarity that Valentine's Day provides, because by driving home the rift between "the haves" and "have-nots" of love, it really outlines in stark black and white the prevailing sentiment of raw frustration that's symptomatic of our times. But! That's all hardly grounds for abandoning the floor of your emotional equilibrium. Expunge from your mind the idea, however timeless yet timely it may seem, that love cannot be explained. Of course it can be explained; besides, it can be divided, analyzed, predicted…
Love is really nothing more than a messy mixture of self-loathing, fear, guilt, loneliness, hunger, and pity, aimed in the right direction and combined in the proper proportions. Of course, figuring out that direction and those proper proportions is the real nut to crack, but it's not really a precision thing anyway. Love waits for you. An elusive, shadowy bastard while you hunts it. But you shall triumph, you and your thirsty companionship and unconditional rapture, even as Valentine's Day unassumingly blips by into another dull year. You will prevail, in spite of your own pathetic self. The stats are on your side.
The bloody Valentine will be a history for you!
