V-Day

I sit at this late hour with a detox tea and sticky fingers from macaroon sandwiches sandwiching cardamom cream.

I really should have gone to sleep more than an hour ago. But the evening didn't have enough time for all that I wanted to do.

This morning I saw a girl walking toward the bus stop, which is right outside my windows. She was carrying a half dozen roses (and if her life has more luck, the number of roses will double every twenty years or so). I remember the many Valentine's Days in high school. I was too poor to buy the roses for $2 each (what a ripoff!) so I bought carnations (the kinds you bring to funerals) for whomever the girl was that I was too shy to say how I really felt.

I was out some parts of the evening, and of course, there were couples walking everywhere, even though it was immensely windy. I almost felt it was Christmas, except that the ubiquitous annoying Christmas songs and decorations were replaced with couples and gaudier decorations.

I thought about this girl from tango, from New York. I asked her if she was going to this event today in New York. She said yes, but probably not in the evening. In my most sincere naïveté, I asked why not. She rolled her eyes and said, "D'uh, maybe because I have dinner plans?" Right, right, she has a boyfriend. They are a sweet couple, but not the show-off kind, so that was my excuse for blocking her out of my memory of a woman "taken." I thought about her because the memory was funny.

I thought about one of my coworkers, someone I haven't mentioned yet. As you know, they are all married. I thought he wasn't married. That he had a girlfriend. She apparently lives "500 miles away," as the Korean guy exaggeratedly said today. But then today I realized this guy also had daughters (plural!). He didn't seem that old to me. Married. Once married. Now with daughters. I don't know why that stayed in my head today. The reason probably isn't that hard to fathom.

I didn't charge my laptop last night so I couldn't write my blog this morning. But hey, I got to write all my thoughts down on this day of opportunity for those forgetting to say "I love you" the whole year to do it at least today, if not on her birthday, anniversary, or whatever else spontaneity doesn't allow in this world of busy couples too cool to remember romance.

I thought about that girl with the flowers again while having my snack in the afternoon. Where did she get all those flowers so early in the morning? Seven! My colleagues were talking about getting flowers toward the end of the work day. Would I be too condescending to say their lives are so simple? I wonder if it feels different buying flowers for a woman you fell in love with and buying them for a woman you think is expecting it on the fourteenth of February.

I don't know. I've never bought flowers on Valentine's Day. I haven't had anyone on this day for more than nine years, and before that, on the few spotty years I did have someone, I think we just went out. It's funny how I have so many feelings, anxieties around this day when I have absolutely no recollection of years when I actually had someone. Pretty messed up.

I thought about a different tango girl also from New York. On Sunday she told me she didn't need a boyfriend (it wasn't in the context of me being interested in her; I can't remember why the subject came up). She was very happy being independent. Really? Normally, I think when a woman says that she just is either in denial or is very disconnected from her desires. With her, I became more believing. And if she's right about herself, I wonder, did her yoga really did all this to liberate her from the need for a man? (She seems quite heterosexual.) I think it's possible to want without needing someone in your life, but that takes an immense amount of internal liberation that I didn't think anyone in the world could attain, especially not at our age.

I am just putting my thoughts down because I am sleepy. I slept just a little more than three hours last night after driving back from New York (fell asleep at the wheels, but while car was parked in front of a McDonald's, of course). But I decided to write something for this confusing holiday. I am surrounded by people who either don't care, don't show they care, or outright antipathetic against the holiday. But all in all, I don't know anyone who doesn't even realize it's Valentine's Day. It appears to affect everyone, even if not in the most positive or economy-stimulating way.

I got a phone call in the evening. One of my closest friends wanted to tell me how disappointed she was. She got a gardening hat for Valentine's Day. I guess it's more original than two dozen roses, but it made her feel very depressed. She wanted to be treated special, be treated like a princess, and all the man knew about her amounted to a gardening hat. How do you live with someone who knows you so little that he gives you such an atrocious gift? He in the end bought her, like most men today in the developed world, two dozen roses that will very soon start rotting, drooping, and be dumped in the garbage while the yellowed water they had been sitting in would go in the toilet along with whatever new colonies formed inside in the meantime. What I say is the truth, even if a bit cynical.

My friend's phone call reminded me the reality that often (not just sometimes) it's much better being alone, and always it is better being alone than being with someone who makes you feel even lonelier. It's hard to find someone who will grow up with you; it's much more likely to find someone who gets lost with you and only end up making both people feel more frustrated than if just one person found herself in the woods. Why my friend doesn't just take at least a temporary break from this relationship at least to gain a perspective is not too difficult to understand. But I will leave your intelligence some room to ruminate.

The last thought I had from today is about being good to yourself. Being Valentine's Day, it is no surprise to find some sort of chocolate theme in the cafeteria at work. There was lots of chocolate sweets. One was this chocolate mousse cake. Do you know, I don't like chocolate? But I like a little bit, so illogically, or logically, I got myself a big piece of mousse cake, pure chocolate. I had it for my afternoon tea. I decided to treat myself. I used to buy flowers for myself because, well, it didn't seem like any woman was going to buy me any, especially since it isn't the most manly thing to enjoy flowers. That same friend who called me to complain about her "hat" told me that when she was single, and she was for not a few years despite being one of the most attractive women I know, she would buy herself Valentine Day gifts. I wasn't thinking about her when I treated myself to this cake, but I thought about my cake when she told me that. Valentine's Day may remind us to connect with the person we chose in our romantic niche, but I feel that it raises expectations based not on love but the lack of love, lack of love for oneself. The holiday itself, subtracting the poisoning by materialism, is rather harmless, even cute, one more excuse to buy her something she likes (or for him!). And yet, for some people, it is an indirect reminder, an indirect reopening of old wounds regarding, that we all have had to give up something in order to be with someone. Perhaps that's why I thought about that tango woman who believes she had reached the nirvana of independence. Once you accept the foregoing of the biological need to be with someone, what's left is a psychological need that can equally simply forgo. Because romantic love is not the only one there, and to think it's central to happiness than, well, we wouldn't be any happier when we do get that kind of love.

I can say that with some certainty only because I think, today, on the day of love, that love for life can't be substituted by love with a woman. The latter, if it exists, is a part of the former, which doesn't need it to exist on its own. The macaroon sandwich I am eating, believe it or not, isn't made by me. I came home very tired and sleepy this evening. Then before I passed the gate of my main entrance I saw this package at the door.

There was a small part of me that thought maybe it was for me! But that part has over the years shrunk to near thin air. For so long I have wanted to at least get a letter, something, from someone not my family or my friends. Just as so many times I wish the person at the door wasn't a mailman, the Fedex guy, or someone looking for my neighbors. (Never had a Jehova's Witness come visit me.) Sort of like when I was in public school, when the phone rang, my heart begged and begged that it was for me from the girl I had a crush on at the moment. Anyway, so for anything remotely like that to happen on Valentine's Day would be even more inconceivable. It was for my roommate, no doubt, the newly wed (brillian enough to wed someone six-hour drive away. Being sarcastic.)

But it was for me. Someone left it at my door. Someone who knew I was going to bake tonight so I have something to eat for my four-o'clock afternoon snack and tea. Someone who knew I was so exhausted that I shouldn't have to bake.

What's beautiful about life is that even when your mind is so stuck with some dreadful idea, when your being stuck could only make you disappointed, despite all this, life still could make you open your mind up to the beauty it offers. In my mind, I wished so much to go on a date at least one Valentine's Day per decade (really not that much to ask, is it?). The idea has rotten so much that it has turned from stale to bitter.

But instead of a date and whatever conventions no less trite than two dozen roses, I got a box of homemade macaroon sandwiches. My heart was warmed not by the candlelight in front of a woman I probably didn't know how to connect with, but rather by the macaroons that somehow that simple but elusive connection to me. And believe me, the pleasure of eating the macaroons is much more satisfying and stress-free, than from whatever trophy I would have gotten after the candlelight dinner with however sexy the woman would be. Life is beautiful like that. When you are busy mending your garden, taking care of the neglected flowers, someone walks past and leaves you a part of their heart, however small or big, it was a piece of it, and it is a river of the sunlight that would helps with the very garden I've been neglecting while trying to find that candlelight in someone else's guarded heart.