Maybe It's Not So Bad

Back in the day, my days of youthful angsty love, I celebrated Valentine's Day in two ways:  wearing all black and putting up bitter love quotes on my AIM profile and away messages.  It became a thing and soon I had friends sending me their bitter love quotes, poems and song lyrics.  A few years after I started my tradition, I had so many people sending me things that I put up a different quote for the first 14 days of the month, saving the best one for last.  A good example, just so you get the picture about the depths of the the bitter, this was one of my favorites: 

Even though you outwit me, I’m not going back to you ... I am not going back to the axe of your love, O triumphant husbandman and lasso king of the gateless horses, I am not going back to you, even though I squirm in your arms and surrender to your will the total essence of my dusty shell here in this captured sweat-hall, I am never coming back, I swear that I will lie to you forever, and I will be never again the cup of your need. 

~ Leonard Cohen

What makes all of this kinda strange is that I loved love, like, really loved it.  If you walked into my room, it would be pretty clear, as I had a wall full of kissing pictures and love quotes.  But, Valentine's Day, it was my Achilles Heel; it didn't seem to matter whether or not I had a boyfriend or was single, the day was always bad.  The boys would say or do really dumb things, like, the one time I got " I thought you'd appreciate it more if I got you flowers the day after Valentine's- that way you wouldn't be expecting it."  There was also the time I got a card from the boyfriend and he had scratched out the word "love" where it was written on the card.  And I don't mean he wrote "love" and then decided against using the word- I mean he bought a card, or found one for free at his parent's house (the more likely choice even though he was in college), and the card itself had the word love written on it.  And he scratched it out.  With pen.  And gave it to me.

Year after year I set myself up for disappointment by having great expectations for the actual day itself as well as for the generally unwise objects of my affection.  So I stopped celebrating it as a day all about the "we" and made me it all about me. 

Looking back on all of this, I can clearly see how I was trying to protect my heart on a day where I was particularly vulnerable.  For the past few years I haven't felt that way anymore, but I still didn't like to acknowledge Valentine's Day out of respect for the old me who promised herself she'd never celebrate it again.  And even though I feel a little bit like I'm letting her down, I've decided that the 29 year old me can't be held to a decision I made at the age of 18.

If I didn't have my Spencer, I might feel differently, but there is something magical about the way a young child is capable of loving everyone and everything without reservation.  Yesterday at church, my faith in Valentine's Day was restored by a four year old boy. He told his mom he wanted to give Spencer a flower and so she went out and bought a rose- which he shyly gave to her in front of me and his parents.  I almost cried.  It was the sweetest thing I have ever seen.  How can I not celebrate a day like that?  I don't want to be closed off because I really believe there is a great love for me out there and I don't want to miss it.

In honor of my decision, and maybe to make a little restitution for all the bitter love quotes I spread throughout the world, I'm putting up my favorite, I love love, love quotes.

When I was apart from you,
    this world did not exist,
    nor any other

~ Rumi

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.

~ Pablo Neruda

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

 

~ Emily Bronte 

 

In the whole of the universe there
are only two: the lover and the
beloved.

~ Bhai Sahib

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.

~Michel de Montaigne 

 

I love her and that's the beginning of everything.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

But my words become stained with your love.
You occupy everything, you occupy everything.

~ Pablo Neruda

 Once in a while, right in the middle of an ordinary life, love gives us a fairy tale.

~ Anonymous

What will survive of us is love.

~ Philip Larkin