A season of love and loss

Everywhere I turn, someone is talking about relationships, love, romance. Several people in the Washington Senate and House spoke movingly about loving bonds as they voted to support same-sex marriage. Radio and television shows have love and relationships as their themes as Valentine's Day approaches. Advertisers, of course, play it heavily.

I'm a sucker for a good love story, but right now, each one feels like someone is stabbing me in the chest. I can't even find respite in sleep. Early this morning, my subconscious pulled me into multiple scenes of people celebrating marriage equality in our state, and over and over again, I was the wet blanket. All I wanted to do was to get away from the joyful throngs and sob in a corner.

Every day I spent with Sandy -- even hard and scary days --
involved laughter. I miss laughing with her.

When I was young and single, I thought of Valentine's Day as a way of making single people feel bad about themselves. Once I was part of a couple, Valentine's Day was a pretty anticlimactic holiday. How many times a day did one of us say "I love you" to the other: 20 times? 30? It was our default phrase, but we always meant it. We went out of our way to make each other's lives easier, bought small gifts for each other frequently, spent time together doing activities we enjoyed. I remember answering some survey questions online about relationships; one of the questions was how often you kissed: once a day, a few times a week, once a week, etc. I was flabbergasted. When we were alone, Sandy and I kissed as punctuation. If one of us left the room, we'd kiss; when one of us entered the room, we'd kiss. When one of us said something amusing, or we solved a puzzle, or the cat did something cute, we'd kiss. In some ways, every day was Valentine's Day.

At first, I thought we'd never celebrated it, but then I began to remember some things that made me smile.

Our first February together, Sandy left a white rose on my front porch for Valentine's Day. I remember finding the rose when I left to go to work that morning. But more than that, I remember the story she told about leaving it there. She was worried that I'd notice the porchlight come on; it has a motion sensor and she always considered me a Gladys Kravitz, far too concerned about everything that goes on in the neighborhood. So she left it and scurried back to her car to watch the porch until the light went off. She was actually hoping I'd find it then, so she could witness it. But I wasn't quite as vigilant as she imagined. If she'd rung the doorbell, I'd have found it, but the porchlight goes on every time someone walks down the sidewalk or a cat runs across the yard. I don't tend to notice it.

This was the picture she had
framed for me that year. It's not
as easy as it looks, you know!

That same year, I took her out to a fancy Italian restaurant; as I recall, neither of us were thrilled with the food. (That was the night she gave me a key to her car, a meaningful gesture; I think she already had a key to my house, but half of Seattle has a key to our house!)

A few years later, she was at Escapade on Valentine's Day. I was incredibly surprised to find a basket full of goodies from her: a book, bath salts, a framed picture of me balancing a spoon on my nose, a sexy card, and a few other things.

And I've always kept above my desk the message she had printed in The Stranger's annual Valentine's Day issue more than a decade ago.*

BRIE - Your love is "more precious than all the gifts of Fortune," and these past five years, I've been luckier than I ever thought possible. I love you. S-

One of us — I don't remember who — cut letters from newspapers to create a ransom note that said "I love you." That may have been a Valentine's Day gesture, but we passed it back and forth for years, leaving it in unexpected places for the other one to find. 

What seems odd to me is that I don't remember much that I did for her, if anything, on all the various Valentine's Days of our relationship. I'm sure there were little things, but I'm always much more likely to remember what she gave me than what I gave her.

*I searched "more precious than all the gifts of Fortune" because I didn't remember what it's from. It's apparently from The Alhambra, but the second link Google shows is to the Stranger archive with those valentines from 2001. I didn't even realize they were online. What a treat!