Despite having a Valentine this year, I completely sympathise with the singles on this day. I’ve been there. Actually, by bad luck and even worse timing, I have always been there. And being half-way across the world this year doesn’t make it much better. No matter how “happily single” you may be, witnessing PDAs around every corner, watching men rush home with chocolates and roses, and being strangled by the pink and red streamers of commercialism cannot be fun. It’s like being hit in the face by a heart-shaped pillow. Repeatedly. And hard.
Or at least, that’s what I thought when I left my apartment on Valentine’s Day.
I had had a lovely conversation with the boy on Skype earlier that morning, but now, the signs on buses flashed obnoxiously with “JOYEUX ST VALENTIN” and “ LES AMOUREUX”. And it seemed that everyone had received the memo to carry around a single red rose. Everyone but me. In class, a project on the tradition of chocolate-giving on Valentine’s Day followed. Was there no end to this taunting? And I even had a Valentine. A wonderful, wonderful one... Or maybe that was the problem? That I knew exactly what I was missing? Well, I was missing it, alright.
But five hours later, I took back every bad thought I had directed toward St Valentine that morning. Because I came home to this:
Of course, I would’ve liked the man behind them, but the sentiment alone had me grinning like an idiot for the rest of the night. Organising the delivery of my favourite flowers (actually, they are white lilies, not Arum...but that’s another story!) from florists offering only French, German and Italian could not have been easy.
After that, I did exactly what I would’ve frowned upon that morning: I plastered a photo of the flowers, complete with a caption of my gushing, straight onto Facebook.
Sorry, my dear readers, I guess love does make you do crazy things after all...
