There are two ways to do February: the rose-and-chocolate version, and the honest version. I have always preferred the honest version, which means February and I have had some genuinely interesting conversations over the years. We understand each other. We have an arrangement. I acknowledge its existence. It acknowledges my complete structural immunity to manufactured romance. We coexist peacefully and I occasionally buy myself flowers for no reason, which is my preferred form of the holiday anyway. True real love has always escapted me.
Valentine's Day and I specifically have a long-standing détente. The greeting card version of love has never done it for me — not because I'm unromantic, I am wildly romantic in practice, but because the greeting-card version asks too little. It's decorative. Real love is not decorative. Real love is an ongoing, daily, sometimes inconvenient practice that looks less like flowers and more like showing up at 11 p.m. with soup when someone needs soup. Love as a verb. Love as something you do rather than something that happens to you.
I wrote "Bullets or Blossoms" in February thinking about a very specific question: if love had to be genuinely honest — uncomfortable, undisguised, completely without soft focus — would I choose that over the prettier, easier version? The answer is yes. It has always been yes. I am constitutionally incapable of choosing the comfortable illusion over the difficult truth, which has caused me occasional inconvenience and has, I believe, made my life considerably more interesting and meaningful than the alternative. This often caused great pain and a rash to honesty.
That is the Valentine's truth I keep returning to: I would rather have the difficult honest version than the prettier easier imitation every time. February is useful because it exposes that preference so clearly. If love is going to ask something of me, I want it to ask for reality. Blossoms are lovely. Bullets are terrible. The point of the poem is that I still choose the version that tells the truth about what devotion costs. Regardless of the price.
Bullets or Blossoms
Bullets or blossoms, paths diverge, In love’s maze where choices surge. I'd brave the bullets, truth through pain, Though softer dreams may call in vain.
Read it in Echoes: Whispers From The Soul →February 2023 was cold and quiet and full of writing. There were poems that arrived at strange hours, which is entirely normal for me. I write at kitchen tables and in parking lots and on the back of post-it note when the line gets stuck behind someone methodically price-checking almonds. The writing comes when it comes. The discipline is not in forcing it — forcing it produces poems that read like they were forced, which helps nobody. The discipline is in being awake when it arrives. In having something to write on within arm's reach at all times. In answering when it calls.
I made a card for someone that February. Not a purchased card — a made one, which is the kind I've always preferred giving. I don't remember exactly what I wrote in it, but I remember it was honest, specific, and almost certainly too long, because my cards always are. I believe love lives in the specifics. Anyone can write "thinking of you." The work is in what you're actually thinking: the particular memory, the specific gratitude, the thing you haven't said yet but mean entirely.
Choose the version of love that costs something real. The free kind — easy, painless, without skin in the game — is usually not worth what you think you're getting, and you tend to find that out at exactly the moment you can least afford to.