Saint Valentine, the day we must Love at any cost.What's love got to do with it anyway?
Ly-Ang’s life journey
Like most humans’, it starts with a carnal passion between two humans. Were these two humans in 'love'? We will never know. One is not here to tell, and the other one would rather not speak about it. So, if there was love at any time, it vanished a long time ago.
Every year since the 8th century, the Western world celebrates the Feast of San Valentine on February 14th. What started as a Christian feast day honouring a martyr, which then became romanticised during the 14th and 15th centuries when the notion of courtly love flourished, has now become a massive global celebration, call it “love”.
On this day, people around the world, no matter their creed, suffer from a sudden attack of mass consumption in all shades of red, sumptuous meals at fancy restaurants, romantic hotel nights, and whatever all the marketing managers around this planet have decided is the greatest way to show love to that significant other, if you happen to have one of any shape, colour, gender, or extra-terrestrial.
After emptying out our pockets giving each other unnecessary gifts during Christmas, we pray to survive “dry January” - not only alcohol dry but also desert-dry pockets. We dig out that last credit card to “show off” that we love someone.
Let’s go back to what brings us all here, Ly-Ang.
Forty-nine years, four months, twenty days, and some hours ago – math has never been a strength – Ly-Ang was conceived by a man and a woman. Let’s be positive and say they were in love, or they sure liked each other enough to satisfy their appetite for each other. Honestly, no one could believe this was planned parenthood, but nine months later, there she was.
Some of you might be thinking “what a harsh way to describe one’s conception”. Let me give you some inside details for you to understand where all these “doubts” come from.
Ly-Ang never heard about Love during her childhood. She never saw adults kissing or having any kind of physical interaction more than dancing. Nobody told her about storks fetching babies from Paris. The only conception she knew about was baby Jesus´, and that was a miracle - imagining God disguised as a pigeon (The Holy Spirit) laying his seed in Mary’s womb. There was no talk about love in that story nor in Eve and Adam´s. One was shaped from the other’s rib and then got thrown out of Eden for speaking with a snake, eating an apple, and realizing they were naked. Like it was Ok to be naked if they didn’t know they were naked.
I hope this makes you understand where the idea of her parents not being “in love” comes from.
This little girl never heard about that wild thing called love.
Ly-Ang was born in a place where love was shown with acts, not with words. Cooking, cleaning, caring, bathing, cuddling, celebrating, sharing, giving, braiding, dancing, supporting one and another were acts of love. She learned that pleasing, doing things that others wanted or needed her to do, not saying no, obeying the adults around her were good acts; therefore, they might as well be acts of love.
She spends eight years of her life believing that was the norm, not knowing there was an entire world out there celebrating one single day of the year as the Love Day. What kind of love? One that involved kissing, hugging, making love, or having sex because of love, or loving someone to have sex with them. It is confusing – I know –, believe me she was also confused, and still is.
Imagine an eight-year-old little girl watching Gone with The Wind, seeing Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable bending their faces - for their noses not to crash - and squeezing their lips against each other while hugging as if they were glued. That was a shock. Something more shocking than that was her mother saying in a very condescending way “there they go bending their heads again”. As you can imagine, that sentence rooted in those little girls’ ears, as if that act of “bending heads” was not a good thing to do, or it was something that only white people did. It might as well have been true because as far as she could remember, she had never seen any black people “bending their heads”.
It is curious how she never wondered where babies came from until she watched that movie. People kissed - I mean bent their heads -, went to bed, and then had babies - interesting -. If that was how babies were made, where did she come from?
Let’s leave that here for another chapter.
There was never any mention about the Feast of San Valentine.
The first notion about that festivity came when she was around eleven years old. Back then, this festivity consisted of an exchange of love cards and love notes with both one’s class crash/es and your best girlfriends. It was an innocent and romanticised notion of love mostly caused by reading Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women.
While the world celebrates a festivity whose origins most do not know about, there might be many out there who have never heard about that kind of love, like Ly-Ang. The type of love that is based on giving material things to someone you love, at least once a year, and wanting to do something special for them on this day. A love full of kisses and hugs, sex, and passion, being celebrated as if there will not be anything left for the rest of the year.
By now you might have guessed that Ly-Ang does not celebrate this festivity. She prefers receiving small doses of “bended heads”, going to bed - maybe not having more babies – and waking up the morning after and getting more of the same.
How simple is that, can we call it L.O.V.E?
How about you? What is your Feast of San Valentine story? I would love to know.
Leave your thoughts in the comments and Happy Bloomingdale's Day!"
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