“What Valentine’s Day Means to Me”
The only time I actually like pink is when I receive it in the form of something Valentine’s Day-related. I’m very vague about this because I don’t get anything Valentine’s Day-related. And you’re about to think, “Oh no, Christine’s going to go into another one of her ‘sucks to be me’ sequences.” I don’t try to aim these journals at “feeling sorry for myself.” These are merely investigations, diving through the trash of twenty years, to try to find meaning to what I am doing today.
If you haven’t noticed lately, I’ve come to the conclusion that I do things as not to build on an existing foundation but to try to form a foundation that I believe never existed. This feeling of incompleteness is not new; in fact, it’s been called under different names such as “parental restriction,” “protectiveness,” and my favorite, “NO.” So what does this have to do with Valentine’s Day, you ask? This particular pimple somewhere toward the middle of February is another one of those holidays that seems to disgust me the other 364 days of the year. It’s a day of togetherness, of sharing, of giving love (or at least attempting to emphasize it through extravagant means). Love is a four-letter word. They’re pieces of me that I throw to the sharks whenever I decide to be human (whatever the hell that means) and stretch my hand out to others. It’s the feeling of bitterness in my tongue when I’m supposed to feel good about something but instead am reprimanded for not helping someone else. It certainly is a four-letter word, and I certainly curse it for one large reason: I don’t get any.
Reading this from a non-sexual standpoint (which I hope you do…goodness), I refer to the unrelenting feeling that I am alone and that I have to waste time, energy, and unnecessary actions to feel like I’m human. I am here in my room with everything I need to somewhat breathe and prosper, but I lack the randomness of company. I don’t have the concern over my safety that I have for others (and which is a habit that I’m trying to get rid of, thank you very much). I return to school and I lose the contacts, the dreams, and the hopes that I had brought along with me from vacations and the small pockets of free time. All I’m left with is the twenty years of academia that has seemed to replace living life – as though all this is a means to an end of some sort that has been destined for me since the beginning of time. If that was the case, I would’ve just let the treadmill takes its course and not run to get there faster! If everything was so clear cut, then what is the point of trying? I try because I believe that if there is a destiny written for me, I have the power to change it to my own whim – of course at the same time offending everyone in my path.
Valentine’s Day – another day in which I am reaffirmed that I’m not to find anyone to help me in the path. I speak of the past on a constant basis, because it’s the most incomplete portion of me. I am told that I shouldn’t look back at it so much, but there is no solace in the present and only false hopes for the future that it drives me nuts when I don’t even get support to patch these cracks! I think of my childhood, when I was bred that everyone was the enemy by virtue of their biological makeup. I think of my mother, the sixth grade posse that I never had, who completely mocked and taunted me when I even tried to think of knowing others as ‘more than friends.’ To this day, I keep these memories of friendships that ‘could’ve been’ to myself because, like film, it is permanently damaged when exposed to the dangers of open air and sunlight. The flowers make me sick. The chocolate makes me sick. People make me sick in general because they get to be people on this particular day and I get to continue on overdrive as the machine I am to get through the day and not think about the fact that I won’t get a Valentine’s Day greeting, the dozen long-stemmed yellow roses on my desk, or the random phone call asking me how I’m doing. As you can see, I am in a loop, because none of these concerns have changed from this year and the year before (and so on and so forth). Perhaps if I continue to loop the same memories, they’ll settle down and maybe I’ll have something stable to keep my feet in. Stability is also a luxury that I know is very far in my future, and that’s why I don’t try to delve into it; it’ll only make my coping with the non-human aspects of me even harder than I have expected them to be.
My lack of turns into the “hatred of.” When love isn’t the solution because it prolongs your pain and longing, you have to discard the current flavor of the moment and switch to the alternative. Sure it makes me feel like crap, but anything is better than feeling of being unloved – at least it makes me feel like something. I had tried ripping myself away from the people that were supposedly my friends and walking away, but it’s impossible to do so when no matter how far you run, they’re still next door. It’s impossible to do so when you want to cry and you’re not even given that luxury because something is due tomorrow and you have to get started on it. So then, what am I allowed to do? Since running away isn’t an option and being treated like a human is impossible, where can I go to hide from this day and make it go away?
And I’m sorry, but turning it into a joke doesn’t help either.
