Yesterday evening, I realized all of a sudden that I needed to get E.S. a card for Valentine’s Day. We’d already decided that we weren’t going to make a big deal of the holiday, but for me to let it go by unremarked didn’t seem like the right choice, either. At the same time, it would be perilously easy to take, according to the card I’d give, any number of emotional steps I feel completely unprepared to take.
Do you have any idea how fucking impossible it is to find a Valentine’s Day card on which the word “love” is not printed anywhere?
Correction: do you have any idea how fucking impossible it is to find a Valentine’s Day card on which the word “love” is not printed anywhere but that also doesn’t have the words “to the best grandparents in the world” on the cover?
I was on the verge of going to the drugstore, buying red construction paper and rubber cement, cutting out a heart shape, and making my own valentine for E.S. The only thing that prevented me was the memory of the valentines I used to make in school, all of which were so lopsided and deformed that they clearly represented hearts in advanced stages of atherosclerosis. So I kept hunting and came up with this:
The artsily-torn pink paper with the embedded leaves indicates that someone has put some effort into making this card, even if that someone wasn’t me. In point of fact, that someone is apparently named Ronin; he, she, or it lives in Wales and, if the information on the back of the card is to be believed, built the thing by hand using recycled materials. The red heart–far more symmetrical than anything I’d be able to manufacture–is a nod to tradition that allows the card to imply an appropriate degree of romantic feeling.
The difficulty of selecting the card was, however, nothing compared to coming up with what to write inside it.
And that, I’m afraid, I’m not going to post here.
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