February 14, 2004 That's the Deal

I suppose I could delve into deeply-felt thoughts about Valentine's Day, but I'm not going to. What's the point? In my mind, if you're single, a holiday celebrating romance ceases to exist that year; in other words, this year, Valentine's Day is not a day. It is dead to me. Rather than get depressed about it, I'm just choosing not to acknowledge its existence. Tonight I'll be meeting up with a friend to eat burritos and ice cream and watch Sex and the City, and tomorrow will involve cocker spaniel sitting and going across the river to see a disco band in a redneck bar. This journal makes it easy to look back at where I was in my mind and heart over the past four years, and I can look back and feel okay. The day in both 2002 and 2003 was full of hope and love, and even though it all ended in a fiery catastrophe of heinosity (twelve days after Valentine's Day last year, to be precise), I can still look back and be grateful in manner of that trite quote that advises you not to cry because it's over but to smile because it happened. That it ended does not erase the fact that it occurred. I'm coming to grips with understanding that I can hate what he did in the end when he tore us apart -- and loathe, despise, and be utterly mystified by who he turned out to be in the aftermath -- and still love who he was when we were together and the life that we lived. Though the two are of course intertwined, the ugliness of what happened in the end can't stain the goodness between us every single day before then. Maybe it should, but no matter how hard memory might try to twist it until that ugly stain seeps backwards in time, it can't. To deny that happiness or to second-guess those times would be fundamentally dishonest and would degrade what was then pure joy. The remaining challenge is learning to let the beginning and the during co-exist with the end in a mode of acceptance and of a steadily growing peace and knowing that what C.S. Lewis said is true, that the pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal. And, of course, to be brave enough to slowly open my slammed-shut heart to all the possibilities that await me. Valentine's Day is dead to me right now, but that does not mean it hasn't made me feel completely full of life while unfolding beautifully before -- or, as I'm trying so very hard to believe, that it won't again. ::: About this time in ... 2003: 2/12: And no matter how wonderful the reasons are behind the whole occasion, and believe me, they are, as you could have found no more amazing human being to wed, and you are brought to tears regularly by the wonder and joy of it all, there is no escaping that the wedding planning sucks. 2002: 2/15: "Do you really love me?" I said. 2/14: Life reveals itself to you through a person who is so much more than he ever was, who makes you more than you thought you would be. 2001: 2/14: I told them how moved I was by the episode when Dan told Dana she stayed in the bathroom too long and how I think that's a lesson for all of us. 2/13: Oh, my sweet Juliette! I'm so happy. You were wonderful in this movie as you always are. I love you, I adore you. 2/12: Intensive care waiting rooms are interesting places. Since the nurses shoo people out of the unit except during the strict visiting hours, families just hang out in there all day. 2000: 2/15: But I will never forget this weekend. It changed me. I will never be able to explain it, but it did, and it changed me in a place that is so deep inside the core of my being that no one will ever be able to see it. Except for me. 2/14: Wesley and I are joined by the bonds of true love, and you cannot track that, not with a thousand bloodhounds, and you cannot break it, not with a thousand swords. 2/12: Whose hand I hold now, as he lies there hooked up to a heart monitor and a saline drip, whose every bodily system seems to be failing in some way, who is waiting for his son, my father, to return tomorrow. get notified. journal archives © Copyright 2004 elb

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