It’s Valentine’s Day and the poem I just posted is all about loss, losing things, learning to master the art of losing … even when you lose someone you love. Ah, such cheery sentiments on this day of love.
I’ve never been a huge fan of Valentine’s Day.
First of all, because I am usually single, and for a single person, there is not a day more obnoxious than Valentine’s Day.
Second of all, in my high school we had these horrific rituals called “flower days”. Did anybody else out there ever have them? Students would volunteer to deliver carnations around the school. You could buy one and say, “Hey, go send this to — [insert name] He has French II with Mr. Pittochi on the third floor.” So I’m in class, the door opens, the flower comes in … and no matter how bitter or jaded I was (and I was a pretty bitter and jaded 16 year old) I always held out this teeny little fragile hope that the flower would be for me. That my “crush”, whoever he was, would also have a crush on me and would send me a damn carnation.
It never was for me. And it turned me off Valentine’s Day for good. My friends and I used to rage to each other about the injustice of “flower days”. Ha ha
Third of all: I’m a Sagittarian. In general, I don’t think we go for the gushy romantic stuff.
However: I don’t want to just post that poem about loss and dealing with grief and leave it at that. I’m still optimistic. So here is one of my favorite poems of all time.
since feeling is first by e.e. cummings
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
–the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
