saint valentine's day

digital angst in the year of our lord twenty twenty-three

I wish that I lived in the 1200s and the only person in my village who is my age is a shepherd. We marry each other because we know like twelve other peasants, so to both of us, we’re the hottest people we’ve ever seen. He can’t break up with me, because God might smite him. I wear daisies in my hair and birth a thousand children. By forty, I happily wither away and die. Dust to dust.

No one in our village has ever heard of dentist appointments or 75 Hard. Everyone is allowed to rot in peace. Days are spent doing needle point, because there’s no Sheryl Sandberg telling me to lean in and no soundscape of Slack pings. Instead, there’s a lot of frolicking. We can’t read, so we tell each other stories at night. We binge on honey combs and don’t question divine right, which is honestly so much easier. Our vocabularies are smaller, and so we worry less, because words for those problems don’t yet exist. Fiddle-dee-dee! The entire village has secure attachment style. 

I’m writing this on Valentine’s Day of 2023. Saint Valentine was the patron saint of courtly love, but did he know that you can delete and redownload Instagram eight times in one morning? Where’s my feast in honor of that? Today, I’m avoiding clicking the sunset band around my ex’s Instagram story. My self-discipline is nonpareil. I only search his profile through my followers list, not the main search bar. (This is to preserve dignity.)

also the patron saint of epilepsy & beekeeping FYI

When Valentine was persecuted and then martyred, did he think it would be for young lovers to put each other’s social media profiles on mute and then ask their friends to screen-record the content on their behalf? I think again about blocking him, but I have this belief that in some span of time (6 more months? a year? 5 years?), I’m going to be this version of myself that is so perfect. A version of myself that will somehow make him regret all the ways he didn’t show up. All I have to do is white knuckle my pain, and get my brows threaded & tinted, and pretend to meditate, and sleep more (why can’t I sleep more?), but also sleep less, and show up to therapy with my homework done like a good girl. 

I’ve diligently deleted all of the iCloud photo reels. But (don’t tell anyone) sometimes I still listen to the voice recordings that I’ve saved. Nothing remarkable, just summaries of his days — what he made for dinner, what he did at work, wrapped up carefully at the end with an I love you. I wonder if we can ever really escape our exes anymore? We’re still made up of villages, but now the villages have all moved to different states and post cryptic semi-regular updates online. 

It’s Valentine’s Day, and my Instagram stories are being cyberstalked by whom I can only assume is someone new. She doesn’t follow me from the burner account, but she watches everything. Her alias: @candicecarmela95. (Why such a sexy alias?) I put on a performance especially for her, a captionless photograph of the dozen roses my dad sent me. Let her infer what she will. Meanwhile, I’m left wondering, does he do my bits with her, the way he would repeat my jokes just a little bit louder at the table? Does he make her dinner with a kitchen towel thrown across his shoulder, sprinkling on top the basil we planted together in the back garden? Does he talk to her about the books I shared with him, only to learn that she also loves The Secret History and The Flavor Bible and that book he never finished about masculinity? (Has he finished it now?) I wonder whether she’s read the messages I left on the inside flaps, my name blooming in curlicued ink next to his. I want her to know, it’s partially the echo of me you’ve fallen in love with. I hope it haunts him, as I swipe past the images of a hundred men, wishing for fewer options. 

If I lived way back when, would I be a nun or a courtesan? To isolate from men or to entertain them. To worship them in one way or another, I think. (On Valentine’s Day, you’re allotted exactly twenty-four hours to be emo as hell.) But then I stroll around campus between classes. I call friends on the phone, and I write, and I drink my recommended water intake, and I think about what city I’ll live in next. I scroll through all the bullet-point lists I made last year in my notes app and cringe (I’ll spare you the details), wondering what would have happened if I’d listened then to what I was trying to tell myself.

I don’t know if I believe in God anymore, but I do have a blind faith I can’t explain that next year will be better. Confirmation class crosses my mind. I summon up an image of the church classroom — gray carpet, King James bibles, television with VHS on a rolling cart. I remember how Martin Luther was a monk obsessed with atoning for his sins, which was probably ye olde anxiety or OCD, but he ended up instigating an entire reformation of the Catholic Church because of it. Just to forgive himself. I hope they have the best Valentine’s Day.