My first Valentine’s was my worst Valentine’s
When my good friend Dave was 11 years old, he sent his first Valentine. Besotted with Leisa, a lovely Scottish lass with almond eyes and brown wavy hair that fell around her newly forming chest, Dave didn’t know much about love, but he did know the card needed to be anonymous. He carefully cut out letters from the local newspaper and sent Leisa a love letter in black and white, closely resembling a ransom note.
When Leisa freaked out and got her boyfriend to find the culprit that sent the note, Dave denied it and went underground, but Leisa was branded on his skin forever.
Half a world away and a few years earlier, an 8-year-old Amie had just discovered that the boy of her dreams, Reuben, had a crush on someone else. My tiny heart sunk and I frantically scrawled a message on scrap paper in HB pencil: ‘‘You have broken my heart. From Amie’’ – shoving the note dramatically into his backpack.
The next day when Reuben told his best friend, I initially blamed the unpopular girl in the class for setting me up, before feeling guilty and owning up to it. After a night of red-eyed ‘‘why mes’’ to my mum, I picked myself up, and turned my attention to someone more deserving.
Almost three decades later and those first, formative experiences have set the tone for a lifetime of loving, respectively.
Against my swell of loves made and broken and lost with drama and gusto, Dave is, by contrast, considered and focused. While he doesn’t send ransom notes, he admires from a distance before moving in like a panther with a gesture that brings notice.
Next to my recitals on love and relationships, he is thoughtful. He listens to me rant about ‘‘the smell of love’’, how I can only really love someone that smells right to me, or how love is a decision you make for life, but is reserved with offering his own opinions. Before we were good friends, I mistook his reflection for detachment. Now I think he knows more about love and relationships than anyone I know.
Two years ago, he gave me a particularly hideous array of Asian specialty goods for a Valentine’s Day present. At the time, a particularly dark day 18 months into widowhood, I had driven 30 minutes into the office to claim the Valentine’s prize he’d told me was on my desk. I imagined Belgian chocolates, or at least Whittakers. I got meat floss. I cried on my drive home, before later realising that those Asian snacks were exactly what I needed on a Valentine’s Day with no Valentine.
This year, I expect a little more romance from the boyfriend than cuttlefish chips or rice snacks. And I’ll also be taking scissors to newsprint to celebrate love and friendship in all its guises and the places it takes us.