February 14th and the Abyss

Valentine’s Day has a uniquely targeted depressive capacity that Christmas can’t touch. Christmas is melancholy in a diffuse, everyone-suffers-equally way. Valentine’s Day is surgical—it identifies exactly who you are in relation to another person, or more precisely, in relation to the absence of one, and it does this while drowning you in red packaging and overpriced prix-fixe menus and couples making out in doorways like they’ve been rehearsing.

You know it won’t fix anything, but you go anyway. To the bar, to the cinema, to whatever corner of the city is least aggressively decorated. The chocolate is marked up 40 percent and will be half price by Thursday. Someone somewhere is holding roses. It is not you. It’s fine. Everything is fine.