A Letter to Saint Valentine
*Note - you may NOT use the content of this post as one of the ingredients when making a Cheese Toast sandwich… however tempting it may be….
“He loves me, He loves me not, He just wants to F*** me, He really cares about me….” ….So wonders Madonna as she childishly plucks petals off a flower in her documentary “Madonna: Truth or Dare” whilst attempting to figure out how Warren Beatty feels for her.
One of the petals will always end up being the truth, we never know which petal we will end up with - the question here really is….despite that, do we still dare?”
As we’ve all heard so many times in our lives, from friends, family, taxi drivers, Hallmark office mugs etc…. Life is not a dress rehearsal. Life is the now, it happens whilst we are busy making other plans, and the stock is limited - we only have one of those. Thus – we have to grab it by the balls/breasts (delete as appropriate) and do the best we can to smile, be happy, and love….
Oh LOVE - that amorphic/multimorphic word that we all know so well & yearn for, it makes our head light and our tummy fill with butterflies. It makes our legs feel like jelly and our heart go all mushy. It slaps this mahoosive grin on our face and makes our eyes glow that there is no mistaking – Cupid is awake, he’s had one too many energy bars for breakfast and he is in his PlayPen again doing what he does best.
LOVE, by it’s dictionary definition, can be ”a many splendind things”. Yet in no dictionary have I found any reference to what we all, unfortunately, may experience de-facto alongside all the good stuff….
LOVE, which we fear so much sometimes to say out loud that we end up saying all the wrong things… LOVE that sometimes feels so overwhelming it makes us feel so nauseous & knotted or worse yet, scares us to near death…. LOVE that we “love” so much we sometimes hold onto too tightly and forget to let it breath….but worse of all, LOVE …that at one point or another we have all shed a tear over and realised that the heart muscle can go into some serious cramps over too…. just like our legs after a hard uphill run… where we feel we cant even stand upright anymore because every move is just so painful… where just like in sports – some are better equipped at dealing with than others… but no one is 100% immune to.
A very wise friend recently told me a very heart warming anecdote. One that I only really ever saw in the movies (always involving a size 34 super pretty Gal and a pearly teethed Guy with perfect hair and a 6 pack). However, this time it really happened to just a couple of normal regular folk.
The plot itself is quite irrelevant, it does of course involve a He, a She, and in this case a random BA flight that needed to be rescheduled and could not - but the bottom line of it all was that things happen for a reason… that destiny can knock on your door when you least expect it…. and that sometimes when Love lands on your lap – even if you dont yet know it, even if it freaks you out - you just need to be brave, suck it up stop resisting it and just dare…
And it’s not easy, and sometimes its scary, and sometimes – it can hurt like hell - but even with the difficulties and volatility, when the core is right, when its real….the reward is so amazing, it can really take your breath away.
So, my dear Saint Valentine , although Hallmark have probably made you filthy rich by now, I do hope you still stick to your original values, because the bottom line is… that on this 14th of February, I say: “I DARE!”.
Happy Valentine’s Day!!!
- Dedicated to a special and very wise friend, who told me this He/She/BA little story. A friend who I funnily enough met in a random kinda way. Dear “F” – may Cupid’s arrow find its way to you – be happy!
