Happy Valentine

I can’t blame the gentleman. When a man knows it is not a fit, he knows just that: it is not a fit. It does not matter if it is but twelve days from Saint Valentine’s Day. There is no use, when there exists not the genuine feeling, in buying a woman flowers. For what reason should he, if he does not mean to say what those petals would whisper to her heart? What benefit could there be if he were to go along with a pointless gesture, only to abandon all of the emotion in a departure from the relationship some days later? He would be nothing but a small fortune less endowed, and she would remain alone wondering if everything of sentiment before this had ever held any real meaning if he hadn’t meant what he implied on the day of love.

It could have been a Sunday or a Tuesday in the middle of June when no holidays were near and I had made no plans. It would still have stung exactly as much. The willing departure of a man from a woman’s life is not the sensation of needle prick, but the lasting sting of a wasp. A man’s termination of a relationship is a pain that persists. A hurt so enduring that when one so randomly cognizes in the middle of some thought or chore, that the end has come about, one relives that sensation as if the wasp had just stuck her and injected its venom. It lingers and lurks, for some time, to know and stumble across mental reminders that she, for someone else, was not “it.”

To know that someone else will one day completely claim, by law and by mutual adoration, the man which she once imagined was her very own, if only for a brief breath in a long series of life’s exhalations, is a sort of injury without a medicine to sufficiently treat it. Like a virus, only time can let the hurt run its course.