“For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love.”
— John Donne
Valentine’s Day is good, actually. It isn’t necessarily consumerist, and it certainly isn’t necessarily anti-romantic. It is almost certainly good and almost certainly romantic, I think. Obviously romantic, I think. But I think, more than that, it is, precisely because it is so thought so wrongly to be so bad, the best champion of celebration—those days that celebrate good, and joy, and love. Love. That is what Valentine’s Day is about, of course. Love. Romantic Love. The creative and interactive appreciation of another person, another world, Andromeda perhaps; and theirs of yours; Andromeda of The Milky Way; of you, perhaps; and back again. The fall and the fall and necessarily so.
Yes. Of course. Love is everyday. But evil takes so much pleasure in its concentration that I think we should take more pleasure in its protest. Every angstrom of a smile of existence in a day is a birthday. That feeling shared and socialised is New Year’s Eve. We say “good morning” because that is the way we say “I’m glad you woke up.” And we say, “I love you, today, more than the last, and lasting as long as I’m lucky enough to call you mine,” because love is a love best felt like a bullet to the head and to the heart, not a whisper through a window from a distance. Feel it today precisely so you can feel it every day. And send a fucking card, you idiot, and buy them flowers, and kiss them. Kiss them forever and today.
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