Valentine's Day

I know it's all a plot by corporate America to fill our landfills with "I Love You" balloons and heart-shaped candy boxes, thus contributing to global climate change and dooming us all to explode in a cataclysmic fury of consumer greed... but I still feel lonely on Valentine's day.
Maybe it's just an excuse to wallow in my single-ness. After all, I can't mope around and eat cartloads of chocolate EVERY day. It's a good day to sit back, watch a couple corny chick flicks, and gain another counterproductive five pounds.
I look at my life and I look in the mirror and the word that springs to mind is, unfathomably, "self-destruction". Every day that I spend in College Algebra is a day lost- a day out of this finite slice that I will never have back. I can't help feeling this is not what I ought to be doing. And it seems like having a special someone would alleviate that.
It's not about candy and flowers and PDA. It's not about having someone to meet in the cafeteria or go out to a movie with. I have that- I have friends. I'm not utterly isolated like some sad crazy cat lady. Not yet, anyway.
The real problem is that I know what it's like when you look into somebody's eyes and you see them looking back at you and you know that they think you're.... well no, really, that's all that matters. They THINK something of you. They think about you. That boy, that other person, has reached across improbable space and singled ME out as someone worthwhile. It's incredibly affirming.

And addictive.

And when it's gone, it's not the same as before you'd ever had it. If a child was raised his whole life in a cold, dark cave ( raised by bats, let's say) and one day, experienced the sun- warm, golden light, soothing pains he hadn't been aware of until he felt the alternative-then- cruelly- he is stuck back in the same stupid cave, left to whimper in the dripping shadows for the rest of his life, isn't he worse off than before he knew? Knew how different life could be?

I have just one thing to say to the sun:

I hate you.

Happy Valentine's day.