Bitterly, With Love
Valentine’s Day is civilization’s most perfectly calibrated cruelty. It extracts money from happy couples for flowers that smell incredible and chocolates that genuinely are delicious and double dildos that, well, someone’s buying them. And it extracts money from miserable singles who can’t think straight because they’re surrounded by people floating on cloud nine, so they buy double portions of vanilla ice cream with chocolate chips. Or a pet. Or a Uzi.
Because of course I want to be in a relationship again. With trust. And love. And regular sex. A steady lay that makes life suddenly make sense—the kind where you can burn down half the planet and still know there’s someone back home who loves you, despite the fatty liver and the small dick.
Walking through the park together, drop-kicking small dogs into the lake, screaming at the sun. Meeting the potential in-laws, explaining with a tomato-red face what you do for a living (something on the internet), then shitting on their toilet seat out of sheer gratitude for the fifteen most excruciating minutes of your entire existence.
We’d ignore everything and spend years in bed. Natasha Khan and Amy Winehouse as our silent witnesses while we worked through every depraved thing we’d learned from ex-partners and Flash videos. Neighbors knocking, doorbell spinning, pillow exploding. A week at McDonald’s, a month in Harry’s wine cellar, a year above the rooftops of Berlin.
We’d stagger through the city with bloody lips and soaked jeans, barely able to believe our luck. That we’d found each other among all these people. Learned to love. I’d look deep into her ocean-blue eyes and could vomit on her face from happiness. Let me be a little Stan. We belong together, baby. Forever. She nods, smiling.
And then a few weeks later the stupid slut cheats on me with her PE teacher and disappears with him to Belgium in the middle of the night. But hey—these things happen. I did get to suck on her toes while she did homework. And I showed her my homemade grasshopper porn. In retrospect that probably wasn’t laying great foundations for a happy future.
So here I sit hating Valentine’s Day because no stupid cow is sending me a handmade card with declarations of love and nude photos attached. Because everyone else is happy and in love and getting fucked. Because there apparently still exists genuine warmth in the world, out there somewhere. Go ahead and celebrate the most disgusting holiday on the calendar—stuff yourselves with flowers and chocolates and double dildos. I’m going to a matchmaking agency. And then I’m setting some hipster children on fire.