In which Sky contemplates Valentine's Day.

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. The second I would have celebrated with my boyfriend (now ex), and I've been somewhat apprehensive about it for a week now.

This isn't a place I feel wholly comfortable writing about intensely personal things, but suffice to say that though our split seemed amicable and mutual, upon examination it was amicable and entirely not mutual. (No, I'm still not ok, yes, I am better than I was.)

Under normal circumstances, I don't much like Valentine's Day. Single, it always seemed like a day that that fact was rubbed into my face. In a relationship, it seemed like a day of forced affection—forced in that it was expected but not entirely of the other's desire to be affectionate right at that very moment. It's an awkward day for anyone who was ever even remotely an outsider in their elementary-through-highschool days. It's not a day I look forward to in general, no matter my current state of pairedness. (That all being said, last Valentine's Day was one of the best I ever had, and it's somewhat painful to remember that.)

Catherynne Valente (yuki_onna) wrote up a wonderful defense of Valentine's Day. Reading it is everything I ever wanted someone to say to me when I said that I hated Valentine's Day. It made me feel better about the impending day of reminders. And while I don't expect that tomorrow is going to be a wholly pleasant day for me, I expect to get through it a little better than I would have for not reading that.

"This world is a beautiful place, but it is also often dark, and cold, and unfeeling, and life slips by, not because it is short, but because it is so difficult to hold onto. Holidays, rituals, these things demarcate the time. They remind us of the sharpness of pleasure and the nearness of death. They tell us when the sun leaves, and when it comes back. They tell us to dance and they tell us to sleep. They tell us who we are, who we have been since we lived on the savannah and hoped to taste cheetah before we died. I know we're all punk rock rebels, but the paleolithic joy of fucking in the fields and dancing around a fire doesn't go away just because certain of us would like to think we're beyond that. This world needs more holidays, not less. More ritual, the gorgeous, flexible, non-dogmatic kind that isn't about religion but about ecstasy in the sheer humanness of our bodies and souls. More chances to reach out, to sing, to love, to bedeck ourselves in ritual colors and become splendid as the year turns around.

And no, I'm sorry. It doesn't work to say "make every day special." First of all, most of you know damn well that you don't shower your partner with gifts and adoration and that most precious of things: dedicated, mindful time every day of the year. Even the best relationship is not a 24/7 orgiastic festival of plenty and perfect moments. No human can sustain it. If every day is special, none of them are. If every day is special, specialness becomes monotony. What makes days special is the time between, the anticipation of a the day, the planning, the surprises, coming together, cooking, playing, reveling in sheer time, watching the dedicated colors and rituals that wire our brain for pleasure spring up in the world to remind us that we live in it. The entire purpose of holidays is that they are a kind of otherworld we step into, full of special symbols, that informs and shapes everyday life--and some of life, no matter how some bloggers would like to deny it in their Grinchitude, is always everyday."

I have no idea how I will be "celebrating" this holiday, if at all. But I might not spend it crying, and I feel good about that—and stronger too.

(Yes, I'm better. Recovered? Not by a long shot. Dealing with this and my life as affected by it has quite possibly been the hardest thing I have ever done.)