Valentine's Day

So Valentine's Day is coming.

I've had violent reactions to the advent of this holiday before. It stops being all cute once you graduate high school -- sure, there are the occasional college sillies where you give your friends valentines and candy hearts, but usually in the face of people who are getting their significant others flowers and dinners out to nice restaurants.

I've done AlternaValentine's before, where a bunch of girls get dressed up and go out to eat somewhere fancy, since no one else is going to take them; and I've done the wearing black bit, and I've done the sitting at home eating too much chocolate and watching some romantic comedy and sniffling. Oo, and last year was viewing a performance of the Vagina Monologues, so I've done the feminist underground thing too.

But this year? I actually feel kind of warm and fuzzy about it. I have no prospects on the horizon, am recovering from the latest attack of bitterness, and will almost certainly be spending V-Day home alone reading Sunshine and sipping a glass of cheap champagne. (Or maybe I'll celebrate by going to see Blood and Chocolate, which I'm told is a wonderful guilty pleasure for the paranormally obsessed).

I think I exhausted my ability to feel jaded and bitter at Christmas, when I had to drive about a thousand miles in a four-day stint just to visit people I'm related to, and had no one in the car with me, and cried because Simon spent Christmas Day at a boarding facility. I broke down then, and haven't been feeling quite that low since.

In fact, some of the nice Valentine's memories have been playing through my head. Don't get excited; none of them have to do with any romantic relationships of my own. But my daddy always got my sister and me a boquet of carnations to put in vases on the table with Mom's roses, and my grandparents always send cards.

But probably the best Valentine's Day happened my sophomore year in college. My roommate at the time and her boyfriend and I hung out together in our teeny dank cave of a dorm room (yay MEP) once in awhile, and at the beginning of the academic year, Erika and James and I were discussing gardening. I didn't have much to contribute to the discussion, really, except for my lovely Midas Touch rosebush which I received as a graduation gift from a high school friend who worked at a greenhouse, and which puts forth enormous yellow roses three times a summer, with a fragrance that haunts with its sweetness. The conversation went on explore roses and other shrubs and flowers, and that was that.

But come Valentine's Day, I got a phone call from the front desk saying there was a boquet for me. Puzzled, I went up to retrieve it...and it was a half-dozen beautifully arranged yellow roses. The card was signed by James.

I ran back to the dorm room and showed Erika, who had her nose buried in her dozen reds from him, and I could barely speak, I was so touched and close to tears. She smiled and said, "He was actually really angry that he couldn't find any Midas Touch roses; these yellows were the best he could do."

So that was my most thoughtful Valentine's Day experience -- when a guy I wasn't even dating remembered my favorite flowers and expressed an act of kindness to a single friend of his.

Sure, I'm sure I'll feel a little blue come Wednesday, but that memory will help tide me over. It's good to remember the agape love, which assuages the absence of eros.