Dear Hallmark:
You've fucked it all up, you know.
You've taken the most amazing, messy, beautifully human emotion, romantic love, and forced it into a red, heart-shaped box of candy and attached a cheap card that contains a stranger's words.
Thanks a lot,
Romantics Everywhere
Here's a tip: if you need the calendar to roll over to February 14th in order to express your emotion for someone, or they for you, you're sort of fucked.
Love is for every day.
EVERYDAY.
Because when you're in love, when you are truly oh-my-God-this-man/woman-absolutely-changes-my-whole-outlook-on-the-world in love, you can't shut up about it. You can't STOP. You can't stop kissing, you can't stop touching, you can't stop melting into each other, you can't stop praying that, somehow, you have taken the way you feel inside, the way you see him/her and, through all of that kissing and touching and talking and connecting and melting, found a way to show it to that person. To give it to them. To let them see themselves the way you do: perfect. Amazing. Beautiful.
Any asshole can say the right words. Any two people can put their mouths together and kiss, any two strangers can fuck. They can even hold each other after and fall asleep in each other's arms.
That's just company. That's just the temporary antidote to loneliness.
Because the good stuff, it's not in the cards, it's not in the flowers, it's not in the box of chocolate or the sex or the gifts or the dinner or any of the motions so many people go through.
It's so much simpler than that.
It's in the way someone looks at you. It's a thing that you can't force or fake, a thing that bubbles to the surface in the most honest of moments.
Some need alcohol or the vulnerability found in sex to get there.
Others of us live there constantly, like an exposed nerve. Lucky me, I have no walls to hide behind (no walls to seek protection behind, either).
It's soft and it's vulnerable and it's scary and it's true and it's what this whole crazy life is for.
So today, on Valentine's Day, save your money on the borrowed words of another, on the flowers, on the chocolate, on the dinner.
Just look into your beloved's eyes and say your own words. Look into him. Look into her.
And then, when that person asks you, "How is it you can still make me feel like that?" you can give the only answer you know:
Because I love you.
