Dear Valentine

VALENTINE's day is the day for everything in love. A teen chock-full of hormones will finally work up the courage to say it all to that one crush she's been observing secretly, eyes fluttering shyly away when he sensed her gaze and met it. A couple nearing that dreaded edge of a cliff, falling off into a deep chasm of divorce, makes up with a few more words, a couple of flowers and so many tears of happiness and love. An elderly couple wake up together like on any other day and share a summer smile just like before knowing that today was different; today was a celebration of them.
Perhaps to someone like me, someone still budding, not quite a girl anymore but not quite a woman either, find this day the most difficult of all days. Valentine's Day. Heavily romanticized in countless movies, books, television sitcoms for the bored and the spinsters. For me it seems to be a casual acceptance of the fact that as yet that thing commonly known as love has still not yet found its way to me. I wondered yesterday when that time would ever come, and how it would happen. A clichéd scene of a crowded room, where the eyes would meet and the fireworks would spark off, a chemical reaction unseen elsewhere. Or a brush of the hand when it was not necessary, seemingly meaningless but forming the foundation for so much more? Maybe a gradual fall - or maybe a slip, a slide - into something that peaked all emotion, forming highs and lows and obliterating the mundane in-between everyday life.
Heard somewhere that love was when you couldn't sleep because life was finally better than your dreams. Heard that it took your breath away and showed you an even better alternative to staying alive. Heard a lot of things because I listened, but maybe felt too little because I never reached out my hand.