The unsuckiness of Valentine's Day

There is a man in my writing group that writes with such impeccable honesty that it makes you cry. "You write the truth" I said to him, lamely, yesterday, faintly embarrassed at my Tirrette's-like outburst. There's something the truth does to you. You know it. It couldn't be anything but. It resonates, somehow. And yet, when most of us write, we embellish and flourish, to make ourselves feel better.

It's true that I didn't like being stuck in Valentine's Day traffic on Sunset Blvd this evening, thrust between cars full of heart-shaped balloons, and men with cigarettes wedged between two fingers, elbows balanced out of car windows, listening to Kai Ryssdal and pretending not to care, but now, when I'm home, and there is a chicken roasting in the oven with potatoes, and I'm thinking of Minky's 18th birthday on Saturday and wondering how it's possible that my perpetually 32 year old self has a baby who's becoming a woman, and books have arrived from Amazon, and the kitchen smells good, I realize that all is well. Valentine's Day is fraught with expectation and overcrowding and forced intimacy. It makes me happy that I'm not in a new, fledgling love, with all the hideousness that February 14 brings to blow the romance, set the bar too high, make the focus stuff.

When I fall in love, it will be May and there will be the promise of summer.

I had a box of chocolates from a girlfriend. Sweet, dear T, who has three dogs and makes me feel brave.  I bought yellow roses for me, Minky and Monica. I ate orange coriander almond ice cream from Sweet Rose Creamery. And now there is roast chicken, and three dogs, and a glass of wine, and a really, really bad episode of American Idol, and there is a house full of freesias and yellow roses, and books on the bedside table, and I feel ok. I mean, really, ok, warm in my heart and my belly, and happy with my curly hair and my beautiful girl and knowing that my boy is happy with his love in Brooklyn, and everything is gonna be all right.