Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day.
I should be happy, I should be excited, I should be dreaming and fantasizing and just generally be in love.
Instead all I want to do is stay home and cry my eyes out. I want to stay and bed and have the whole day pass me like I don’t exist. All I want is for all this to just stop and fast forward.
I shouldn’t be this way.
Once upon a time I was a girl who watched everyone. Envied everyone. Every year I would sit and wait my turn, hoping that one day I would be that girl who got the secret valentine, the girl who had the romantic dinner, who had the love of her life set up candles in the bedroom and do something so utterly selfless it would make me fall in love with them all over again.
Every year it didn’t happen, I sat there and convinced myself by saying the longer I waited, the better it would be. I would have what I wanted so desperately and I would no longer be the outsider sitting and looking in. Instead I would be the one everyone else envied. I would be the special girl, the one girl that someone couldn’t, wouldn’t live without. For years I read about it, saw it happen, watched painfully as every girl I knew got what I dreamt about and wanted.
I know I’m only 23. I know you say I’m still young. I know you’re thinking how could I have possibly be doing this for years. But you don’t understand. I’ve lived in a house where no one says I love you. I’ve lived in a house where no one compliments you or makes you feel good about yourself. I’ve lived in a house where I’ve always struggled with trying to accept what I have as being all I was going to get. So the only way I dealt with all of this was to dream. The dreams were what helped me sleep at night. They made me happy in the morning, they got me through the day. It’s what kept me feeling like one day, I will finally be able to get what I want. I’ve struggled so long, I deserve that much, right?
And then I fell in love with this beautiful boy. He was sweet to me, so gentlemanly even though we were young. It was like he was so much older even though he was the same age as me. He treated me with respect. So careful with trying not to break things that perhaps we started off too slow. My insecurities came back with a vengeance after just a few weeks of being together. I tried to push them aside. Thinking that if he loves me and wants to be with me, then he wants me. It’s there, I just may be too dumb to see it. It morphed into him liking me but not wanting me. And yet even with that I was willing to settle for less. It’s ok, I don’t need someone who wants to kiss me, as long as he loves me, it’s ok.
Things changed, turns out that he was just scared. Who wouldn’t love someone that was too scared of screwing things up? I hated that he allowed me to feel that way but I was honoured that he cared about me that much.
Then he went away to school. Distance I thought I could do. God knows that I had never expected such pain. The time at home was bad. My family hated me. My commute was hard. School was extremely difficult. My friends left me. He was gone. But I kept dreaming. Promising myself that I was due for more. It was meant to happen eventually.
He forgot my birthday. I didn’t know then that he had a bad memory. All I could think about is that he was cheating on me. Someone else was more important. He loved someone else more than me. What’s to love about me? No one has before. No one will. It was supposed to be special. I was forgotten.
He made up for it. My first Valentine’s ever, my poor beautiful boy who didn’t have money to even pay for school made me feel like a queen. He got me a chocolate rose, not any rose that would wilt and die. I still have it. He made me a cd of my favourite songs of that point in time; so old school but who cares? He thought long and hard about the tracklist, that’s all that mattered to me. And he hung hearts from the ceiling. Not just any hearts. Hearts that held meaningful words. Some touching, others more naughty than nice but they were all there. Hanging in his dorm room waiting for me to see them. It was incredible. Maybe he didn’t realize he set the bar for himself. Maybe he didn’t realize how much it meant to me. I felt like I was finally getting something that I deserved. I was getting my due. It never occurred to me for one moment that it wasn’t about Valentines or romance; that instead it was just a grand gesture to get me to forgive him for forgetting my birthday two weeks prior.
How much I wish that someone had told me. Shook me and made me realize that was it. That’s all I was going to get. It was the extent of what I had deserved for enduring so many years of people flaunting what they had in my face. No one told me that it wouldn’t be happening for me.
Four years later I was still hoping for that. The hearts from the ceiling. Something creative and magical done with me in mind. It never occurred to me that every year it became more evident that the valentine’s days that have passed we become less and less what I wanted and had come to expect.
Rude awakenings are cruel. They aren’t fair. They hurt too much.
One of the first times we could actually spend Valentine’s together on the same day. We had plans. I dressed up for him, I wore sexy lingerie. I tried hard, psyched myself up, tried to turn into someone he couldn’t resist. I failed so miserably, I know everyone saw it. He’d rather watch the Olympics than look at me. I know he worked that day and he was tired but dammit so was I. I tried to entice him, he wasn’t interested. I realized that moment that it was going to be one of those train wrecks, the ones you can’t stop. Little did I know how it was going to end.
He had already taken a lot from me the previous year. He didn’t want to get married, would never speak about kids; talking about the future was never going to happen. He said it from the bottom of his heart. I had pleaded, begged, tried to show him that I’m not his family but he didn’t love me enough to give me the chance. That alone would have broke some people. They wouldn’t have fought him after that, but I was a fool and I stayed. Hoping I would change his mind. He knows I’m a romantic. He knows how much I love sweet things, pretty things, creative ideas, it’s not about the money. Never was.
All these years I’ve read romance novels. To see someone else’s story, to sometimes replace the characters with me and him, to pretend to have a happy ending, to have a happy life. It was all I had left. It was bad enough that when I was a kid I started dreaming about a beautiful white wedding with the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with; to have that shattered. When words are said, repeated, without hesitation, you cannot decide to take them back. To pretend they never happened to say it was a mistake. If everyone could do that, no one would be telling the truth, no one would stick to their word. I had to decide if it was ok, if I could stay with someone who might never want to marry me and I decided as much as I want to be married, I loved him more. It would hurt, probably for a very long time, but he meant more to me. At least I had other things.
That Valentine’s day he took those other things from me. Told me he might not want to settle down, he would like to move elsewhere, travel maybe. He never told me if I was included in the equation. I tried to make a valiant effort to get him to talk about our future, he told me adamantly that he would refuse to discuss it. Then I had to open my mouth and tell him what I had been expecting for that night. What I’ve always wanted.
To have someone tell you, to your face, with absolutely no hesitation that you would never got what you wanted; I can’t even try to explain to you how much it hurts. He told me that all the things I read about or watched on tv; the romance, the seduction, the candles, the courting. It would never happen. He told me he couldn’t do that. He wouldn’t do that. At first I didn’t understand. I thought he meant that he just didn’t know how. I thought that it was just something he didn’t have experience in. I didn’t know that he meant it would never be in the cards for me. He knows what kind of person I am, he says he loves me so much, why would he tell me that? Why would anyone tell a girl that. On what’s supposedly the most romantic night of the year aside from Christmas and New Years. Days which we’ve never spent together. Why? I’ve waited so long, I’ve been patient, why would this happen? What did I do wrong?
And then I slowly realized what he meant. I slowly began to recount the number of times within the past 4 years of how many times he’s done those things for me. I began to realize that he was right. That I’ve been blind this whole time. Every year I had chalked it up to experience, I had justified it as him not having enough time, or he just didn’t know what to do. But he said he knows me, he loves me.
It hurt me so much. Hurts me now still. The pain hasn’t diminished. Over a year and I haven’t forgiven him for saying those things. No guy should tell a girl things like that, let alone on a day they’ve been looking forward to for a long time. It’s unacceptable. And not just telling them things like that, but also not realizing how you’ve damaged them.
He was the beautiful boy who hung hearts from the ceiling for me. The romance is there. He just doesn’t have it for me. There will be a girl that comes into his life that he will want to be married to. A girl he wishes to have them bear his child. A girl who he would hang hearts from the ceiling for without any hesitation, to light candles in a room and make love to her, to take her on a romantic date and tell her she’s beautiful, regardless of how she looks, to make her believe it.
And I, the girl who tried everything, who tried to make him see that I would give up everything in a heartbeat for him, that I already had done so much damage to the people who loved me for him, I would be nothing. He’ll walk away and I will be left there. Having lost not only him, but everything else I’ve ever wanted because I was told that I’m not worthy of any of it.
And I know I’m still the fool. I’m with him still. Hoping for a miracle maybe, or just buying my time for when he walks away. I feel like once he does I won’t even have that ever again. So I still read my books. I pretend that he’s my prince. I pretend I will get married to him and have a wonderful wedding. I live with him, have beautiful children whom we both love. The romance is always there, he knows what a simple flower means, a note on my desk, a letter mailed to me, a surprise visit. Walking into a room filled with candles, my favourite music playing, whispered words of love, affection and more. It’s all there, in my head. And I have to take that as being that little ray of hope that one day maybe he’ll feel that way about me.
Because if I don’t have that, what else is left? My friends can leave me if they choose, I don’t offer them much, it’s been proven in the past. My parents only love me because I work so hard. I’m sick, I’ve been told I’ll never be able to be the person I once was. Happiness is fleeting in a job environment because of office politics. What else is there?
