1. When I was twenty I broke up with my girlfriend two or three days before Valentine’s Day. I watched her pack her things and break things while I stood silently. I had nothing to say to her. She was right, I didn’t love her and I had in fact left her for someone else.

“It’s not that I don’t like you, I just don’t really like women,” I said. “This was a big mistake.”

On Valentine’s Day, I opened a box of candy from my estranged mother and had dinner with a friend who talked my ear off about how much weight she had lost with Jenny Craig.

2. Three years ago, I thought I was completely in love with my then sort of boyfriend. We were involved at the very least. I had bought Chinese food boxes and filled them with every variety of gummi candy imaginable. I sent comic books, a handmade card, all the tchoctchkes a nerd would love. I wrapped it up lovingly and sent it to him.

Valentine’s Day was the day after my best friend’s birthday and she and I were hungover from her party. We ate burgers, cheddar biscuits, chocolate together, hoping the grease would soak up the booze in our bodies. We did typically lame things and settled into her couch to watch Nights in Rodanthe. He called me halfway through the movie and I took the call, assuring my friend she could keep watching without me. I grinned slowly and waited for the exclamation of thanks at my gift after our greetings.

“I just got home from a date,” he said.

“What?”

“Yeah, I had a blind date with some girl who’s friends with a friend of mine. It sucked.”

“I’m really sorry about that.”

“Yeah.” He swallowed and I felt my heart swimming in the previous night’s vodka. “Oh, hey, your package arrived.”

I thought about how I had paid extra for it to arrive by Valentine’s Day, how I had wrapped it lovingly because he’d told me he’d never had a real Valentine’s Day before, how eager I had been for three days to hear if he really liked it. He opened it and I heard his happiness at the gift but I was already underwater.

“It’s great, thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome.”

“I just sent you a card.”

“It’s ok.” I sounded detached.

“The date was whatever.” He swallowed. “I mean, you don’t even want to be officially together yet so you know, I figured it was ok.”

“Yeah.”

This is why we weren’t together. I didn’t trust you any more then than I did the day I left. Every instinct told me it was wrong to but I fought it for years. I wished you a happy valentine’s day and went back to the couch. James Franco was telling Diane Lane about how Richard Gere had died in a mudslide and I laughed. She laughed, too, but I laughed so hard that it looked like my tears were from laughing rather than the voice that had been on the other end of the line.

3. Last year, it was Valentine’s Day and I woke up to email from this man. He owed me money and was paying it back as slowly as possible, prolonging the break I had made months ago. I woke up to this and the thought that you never really know someone you love, who you sleep next to. I woke up to the idea that you can give yourself entirely and you won’t be able to make someone act like a human. I woke up to the idea that someone who goes out of his way to hurt you on purpose is nothing but a waste of a skeleton. I woke up aware that at some point everyone has loved a complete stranger.

4. Today, I woke up to you, to real love, to exactly what I deserve and what I never dreamed I’d have, and that is enough to make up for every bad Valentine’s Day I’ve ever had.