The sun rose with a particular pleasantry this morning, painting the sky over the idyllic snow-topped hills a sticky shade of pink. Fewer auspicious mornings could be said to open a day as isolated as this one has been, and fewer holidays I claim to love have been passed in such misery. Valentine’s Day, 2022. I sustained my longest episode of lost speech today (five hours where words were knives in my throat), swayed under the weight of being unable to see or contact my boyfriend (cruel irony), and agonized over a physics quiz until I bled marks. The only thing that distinguishes this day in February from any other is the cloud of profound disappointment that hangs over it all. My solace is the continued beauty of the sun, which delivers a warm gradient of golden light through my delicate white curtains.
I live in a state of love. I adore luminous reds and saccharine pinks, will cry at a romantic comedy or a French New Wave critical darling (so long as there’s love in it), and might be tempted to wear my glasses again if they had heart-shaped lenses. Every story ever told is about love or the lack of it, at least through my rose-tinted goggles. I have devoted enough years to turning the language of infatuation over in my hands to know the pain of its absence—sometimes you’ll have love, and it isn’t the kind of love you want, and it can be worse than nothing at all. (“If you love me,” wrote Richard Siken, “you don’t love me in a way I understand.”)
This is the part of the reflection on love where the author begins to rail against their own faults, those of the people dearest to them, and attributes the longing they feel for something greater a deficiency of the culture. I know this tendency very well, because I have written from it with a bleeding heart enamored by In the Mood for Love and the accomplished work of Jane Austen. Behind every cynic is someone aching to be better understood; at least in my experience. And if I were still a cynic, I would criticize the commercialization of Valentine’s Day, deride the plastic-ridden tokens of endearment, and mock the Western desire to shape the sum total of their dollar store products as exaggerated facsimiles of the human heart.
It is tiresome to be on constant lookout for the grains at the center of the pearl, the expiry date for any joy you might receive, nefarious designs behind each and every product of human experience. I look at the wall in a store on my way home, ablaze with lights and love, and am overcome by fondness at the hearts. You have my heart is a typical endearment, one that likens the lover to the muscle that keeps blood pumping around your body every day. You have my heart, you have my life, you keep me going. You are the reason I wander through shelves of cherry-flavored extravaganzas, vulnerable in my sincere joy, aglow with a soft radiance only you can inspire. (Not necessarily a romantic interest, per se, but there’s always the possibility of one.)
An exchange of affection is not just taking someone else’s heart in our hand—it’s putting ours in theirs, and trusting them to be kind with it. Trust means freedom from the anticipation of pain; means knowing that the exhilaration of being known and loved because you are is worth the possibility of its ending; means accepting that being left is not an inevitability. I am choosing to trust, to show my friends hastily written notes describing my lost speech and hope they will still be kind, to assume the best intent until I am proven wrong. Insanity is defined as the repetition of the same events and expecting different results; I extend this to argue that delusion is the expectation of the same ending after vastly different events with vastly different people. Someone might have to leave, someone might leave in the end, but there is nothing to be gained from visualizing their retreating back. Who has taught us not to expect love? The truly naïve are not the romantics, but rather those who reduce the sum total of human ability to cruelty and harm.
The natural hue of the sky is once again sheltered; this time in the cresting oranges and forgiving pinks of dusk. It is meant to be trite to start with a sunrise and end with a sunset, but I believe in the importance of sincerity, conviction, a candy-coated earnestness that resists all attempts of being curdled into resentment. I want these simple joys. I want to press sugary, lip gloss redolent kisses to the envelopes of love letters. I want to watch the sunrise over the highway and watch it set on a rooftop with my best friend, the heels of our sneakers smacking the open air below us. I want a first kiss that tastes like a beginning, to wake up hours later and bury my face in my hands with excitement. I want to run down the road without my coat at the brink of spring, my arms thrown open wide, breathing so hard the birds flutter after me in concern, ready to accept the grace granted to me without checking it for faults.
I want I want I want—the litany of love.