and now, a love letter 💌
I wrote this for you, but more importantly, I wrote this for me.
I used to hate Valentine’s Day. The hallmark card greeters can’t fool me, I used to quip. Valentine’s Day is a money grab that only shows how uninspiring and repetitive people can be. Oh young Dani, the cynic you are. When I wasn’t being loud about how useless this day was, I was actively ignoring its existence. What’s the big deal? It’s just another Wednesday. Who cares?
Both of these approaches were symptoms of a larger problem I refused to admit. I saw love as this thing that existed somewhere far off without me. Of course, this was the result of Valentine’s Day being overly advertised as a day of celebrating romantic love. How could I celebrate something I didn’t experience? For many, Valentine’s Day is a painful reminder of heartbreak. Of grief. Of wanting something out of reach. Of endings. The list goes on. If today hurts for you in any way, I hope someday it hurts a little less.
I won’t get on my soapbox about self-love being the most important love of all or about how all love matters. Frankly, I think it is pretty condescending when people do that. Romantic love is something some folks want and not experiencing that does an incalculable amount of damage to one’s sense of self. I would know.
Two years ago, I read Morgan Harper’s essay in Elle titled “Confessions of a Perpetually Single Woman.” The essay is part of the collection Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown's Cult Classic, one of the many books in my to-read pile. The first time I read this essay I cried so hard I sent it to my therapist so we could discuss it at length. I love this essay so much because Morgan Parker, as she often does, says the quiet part out loud. Here is someone naming her desires and the pain of feeling deeply undesirable. I think this is something many of us experience, but especially as a queer disabled fat Black woman, I really get that feeling. I now know it’s pretty common to be in your later 20s/early 30s without having gone through a major long-term romantic relationship but reading this essay in the summer of 2022 felt like I was being let in on a secret.
I think a lot about bell hooks, about her writing on love and her spending a large portion of her life single and celibate. While she expressed a desire for a partner, she recognized her life as equally meaningful without one. Not to be glass-half-full about it, but I’m paying attention to her naming partnership as something she wanted because so many of us are often too afraid to admit we want partnership.
There aren’t enough radical texts that will undo the years I spent feeling deeply and wholly unlovable. I can’t self-love my way out of the material conditions of desirability. But I can love myself enough to know that it is a disservice to myself and the people who love me to not treat myself with kindness and truly look in the mirror and see the hottest bitch alive. My value isn’t in what others think of the way I look. It is living day in and day out in and with myself and my body. It’s no surprise that even at my lowest, seeing other fat Black femmes turn a look, be style icons, and fight for equity that I have felt free. It is no surprise that one of my favorite poets, Lucille Clifton, writes so much about her body and its beauty. Her poem “Song at Midnight” rings loudly in my head today.
Rounder than the moon and far more faithful? That ending monostiche? Whew. My cancer queen. OG lover girl.
My attitude around Valentine’s Day is changing because well, earnestness is like really hot. It’s cool to say things with your chest. To mean it and not take it back. It still makes me cringe, don’t get me wrong, but if I am working towards a world where people’s material needs being met is the baseline, then I believe in love. The collective power of the people is why I’m holding out for all forms of love I want, and why I loudly tell my friends that we will find the same love we put into the world. Liberation is an act of love even if it first begins within.
I’m really glad to say that now that my frontal lobe nears its second leap year and as I enter my Saturn return how much I’m willing to make room for love in all its forms. I am a lover girl. I am an I love you slut, tacking the 8-letter phrase at the end of phone calls, sandwiching it between get home safe and text me when you get there at the end of my nights out with friends. I love to tell people I love them, and there’s more than enough love to go around, even for me. I love that my ancestors survived brutality, even though they never should have had to face it in the first place. I love that my friends are committed to revolutionary struggle and liberation. I love the home I have cultivated with my partner in crime and gossip. I love that my sister and my goddaughter clown me on the regular. I love my quiet, involuntary optimism for love in my life in new forms. I love that there are people across the world fighting tirelessly for Palestinians, for Sudanese folks, for Haitians and Congolese people, and for all oppressed people of the world. I love my stupid silly cat, Beans.
A year ago I did a love spell with a group of friends and watched Practical Magic for the first time. It was the Aquarius New Moon. We wrote about what we looked for in love and tucked the letter somewhere safe. We burned away the things we were no longer accepting in partnership. Arti will tell you I was skeptical about this at first. My inner church girl was on the fence but I’ll always look back at that night as a night of intentions filled with a lot of weed and kooky women.
Besides, I’ve been bopping around with pink box braids down to my ass and I’ve kinda adopted a monochromatic pink look as of late. Valentine’s Day is my color palette. It’s time we get on one accord.
