in defense of paper hearts
The year my heart broke, I learned to love Valentine's Day.
The year my heart broke, I learned to love Valentine's Day. There's something almost too perfect about that, like a workshop story trying too hard for symmetry. But sometimes life hands you these moments of obvious metaphor, and you just have to lean into them.
It was February 13th. The city was that particular shade of winter gray that feels less like a color and more like an absence of something. In a Vietnamese restaurant on Second Avenue, between spoonfuls of pho, my boyfriend told me about the other woman. The steam from the bowl fogged up my glasses, and I remember thinking how convenient that was, like the universe offering me a moment of soft focus when I needed it most.
The next morning, I woke up to a city transformed by commercial love. Red hearts in windows, pink balloons straining against ribbon constraints, roses wrapped in plastic wilting glamorously in deli buckets. Everything felt garish and perfect in its artificiality. Like a stage set for someone else's romance.
I bought myself Vosges truffles that day. Not the small box. The ridiculous one, the one I'd always looked at and thought "who buys that?" Purple and gold, heavy as a book of poems. The saleswoman wrapped it in paper the color of wine, and for a moment I thought about all the ways we package love, try to make it presentable.
In my apartment, I lined the truffles up on a white plate. Madagascar vanilla, Hungarian honey, Tuscan olive oil. Each one a tiny world of flavor, a passport to somewhere I'd never been. I ate them slowly, reading Neruda's love sonnets out loud to my empty living room. Not because I was sad, but because beautiful words deserve to be heard, even when there's no one there to listen.
That's when I understood something about love and its artifacts. How we create ritual from routine, meaning from mundane moments. How a heart-shaped box of candy isn't about the candy at all, but about the way we learn to hold sweetness on our tongues when we need it most.
Years later, I still buy myself those truffles every Valentine's Day. Even now, when I share them with someone who knows how to love me better. We sit on the floor of our apartment, trading pieces like secrets. Hungarian honey for Argentinian dulce de leche. Barcelona sea salt for Provence lavender. A map of the world in chocolate and trust.
Some people call Valentine's Day commercial, artificial, forced. They're not wrong. But so is fiction, and we still find truth in it. So is poetry, and it still breaks us open. So is any ritual we create to make meaning out of time passing, to mark the moments when we choose love over fear, abundance over scarcity, beginning over ending.
This morning, I passed that same Vietnamese restaurant. New owners now, different soup. But every February, I think about that girl with the foggy glasses, not knowing she was about to learn something about love that no one could teach her. How sometimes the heart has to break to let the light in. How healing often looks like buying yourself the expensive chocolate and not saving it for a special occasion. How love, like writing, is mostly about paying attention to the details others miss.
Tonight, I'll make heart-shaped pancakes for dinner, not because tradition demands it, but because there's poetry in breakfast at night, in breaking rules that don't matter, in finding whimsy in the midst of winter. I'll probably set off the smoke alarm. The first pancake will be misshapen, more abstract expressionism than heart. But that's the thing about love – it rarely looks the way we think it should. The trick is learning to see the beauty in what it actually is.