An Open Letter on St. Valentine’s Day
We don’t “need” Valentine’s Day to show love
February 14, 2020
To Whom It May Concern,
I don’t necessarily “need” Valentine’s Day to show love, and maybe you don’t either — but I don’t mind celebrating it. However, I am often melancholy, not sad, just deeply pensive, when the day rolls around whether I am in a relationship or not because for some of us, love is inherent, instinctual, and never premeditated. During the fall of 2014, one of my dearest friends and fiercest life supporters was taken to the hospital to endure a battle for her life, which truly shook me and our close friends, all night and all day long. At the time, I was probably shaken more by the potential loss of her life than I would’ve been for my own. Perhaps, that’s because I know what pain feels like. And, at some point in your life, you have also been all too familiar with pain, disappointment, and abandonment? Thus, why be a producer of something you know deafens the spirit that lies within each of us? I have been loved hard, but I also love harder because I am too familiar with being loved softly.
As I write this, I am looking at a silk handkerchief sprayed with a former lover’s favorite cologne, “Think of me,” he said, through tears and airy breath before catching a plane as he handed me the square of silk. The smell of his cologne wafted through the air. I remember it vividly.
And now I’m looking over at an old Polaroid of a former lover taken in a historic Downtown Los Angeles warehouse. “I hate that I love you so much. You were always number one,” he said to me. I showed up to his apartment one day with flowers to surprise him after we had broken up, but it was too late. He only set the door ajar because he was there with someone else — when I decided I had learned how to love him back. It was too late; my ego was crushed, but I learned a lot that evening as I sat in my car doing the “ugly cry” on my steering wheel.
And later in life when I knew how to love, I did. But, I’m looking over at a book on my shelf, “I Will Never Forget You,” that I bought in the Marais section of Paris. The book is filled with love letters and photographs of Frida Kahlo and Nickolas Muray. I remember packing the book carefully in my luggage and nervously awaiting my arrival at JFK airport to present my lover with his present knowing nothing of what awaited me once I arrived. After the plane landed, I messaged him about our dinner plans while waiting on the tarmac. He replied, “You didn’t check your email?” I hadn’t. “Check your email,” he wrote back. I had only been away for a month. I couldn’t connect to my email through my phone so I rushed home as fast as I could. I walked over my threshold with bags half my size to an empty apartment. I raced through the door with my luggage, checked my email, and could barely keep it together in the moments that followed as I read the antithesis of what Stevie Wonder meant when he sang, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered.” Jackie, a best friend of mines and roommate knocked on my door for two days to say she was thinking about me. “I love you,” she’d shout through the door jam. I wouldn’t open the door, but I responded softly, “Thank you.” On the third day, I finally opened the door to face her. A couple years later, I removed the plastic covering from the Frida Kahlo book of letters and decided to read it.
And now, I am thinking of when I loved, lost, then loved the same man. During a hiatus in our union, my rock, Shanelle, came to my dormitory, slung open the shades and we ate gooey cinnamon buns together, with extra frosting. But then, just months later, he picked me up in front of my dormitory in a tuxedo carrying me away to a nervous, but confident, proposal in a sculpture garden. Inside a canvas-covered locket it read, “Will you marry me?” The fight for marriage equality was never a deterrent for him or me then. He just knew he loved me. I loved him. That was it. I gave back the ring a year later and ended the proposal because I knew I had things I needed to learn about myself and didn’t want to hurt him in the process. He found a way to return the ring to me. Young, dumb, but crazy in love we were. We’re too different now, but he believed in me and everything I aspired to be and I held the same truths for him.
That friend in the hospital I mentioned earlier, well, she’s much better these days and we joke like old times again. But I remember before I moved to New York in 2010, we were sharing a bottle of “Two-Buck Chuck” from Trader Joe’s one late evening and talking as we often did after long days at work. On this distinct evening, she lovingly reminded me that if I never love another again, that I have loved, and that is enough. She passionately spoke about how some people go an entire lifetime without knowing the depth of the feelings I once had, the memories that I could own.
So with that, while the color red swarms you and florists decide to double and triple the cost of roses today, let’s not take it all for granted — no matter how love manifests for each of us. I am certainly no expert on the whens and whys of life, but I have lived and I pray the Universe will allow me to keep doing so. Though I do not believe the entirety of our lives are meant to play out in solitude, I will say this — I am thankful for the ability to tap into a capacity, and sometimes a reserve, to keep loving those around me. But, this is life and sometimes we cannot always see what is in front of us. But also, this is life, and we sometimes need to look at it in pink, la vie en rose, through rose-colored glasses. So for St. Valentine’s Day, whether it’s your boo or bae, mother or guardian, your beautiful child, or the homeless human at your subway, metro, or tube stations — think about the power of love, not simply the act. Look for love within yourself and spread it wildly. Thus, when it comes down to it, I suppose I am grateful as my friend told me I should be. “With a thousand sweet kisses, I’ll cover you,” as the song goes. Thank you to all those and to all things that have covered me, too.
And I would be remiss in thinking about love on this day without leaving a little Audre Lorde at the doorstep: “Revolution is not a one-time event.”
Je t’embrasse fort | With strong embrace,
Marcus
