Hi friends,
Happy Valentine’s Day to those who celebrate and those who don’t. This week’s newsletter comes from Sheffield, where my partner and I are looking after an elderly floof, Mr. B.
In elementary school, the approach of Valentine’s Day meant one thing. It was time to take a trip to Vons, my local supermarket, and pick out a box of Valentine’s cards. This was back in the ’90s, where themed cards were sold in cardboard boxes. You would choose between Rugrats or Batman or Power Rangers or Space Jam or Sailor Moon or Ninja Turtles, or whatever was the cool cartoon or sports hero du jour. A box contained a handful of card designs, each with its own Valentine greeting (or cheesy inuendo). Maybe you’d select a box that represented your personal taste, but more likely you’d pick one that your crush would think was cool.
Valentine’s Day was something of an event at school. Inevitably somebody’s parent would bring treats for us—boxes of Sweethearts, of course, but also those pillowy sugar cookies covered in pink frosting and rainbow sprinkles—the type that left your mouth dry but nothing a swig from a kid-size milk cartoon couldn’t fix. With a welcomed departure from our regular teaching schedule, we’d have a special arts and crafts session to make Valentine’s ‘mailbags.’ These were usually white paper lunch bags, which we’d decorate with doilies, glittery heart stickers, purple pom poms, and puffy glue. We’d write our names on the outside of the baggie, which we’d place on the corner of our desks, open, empty, anticipatory. I’d draw a heart next to my name, written in bubbly lettering I’d been practicing in my new gel pens.
The established school rule was that you had to give every student in your class a Valentine’s card, not just your friends or the kid(s) you were crushing on. This also meant that you had to be strategic with how you dished out your own cards. Would you give your crush a card with a more brazen message on it, or would you go for one of the subdued ones in case the feelings weren’t mutual? Would you dare sign your name on the card to your crush, or would you slip them an anonymous love note? Writing cards was not just a matter of courtesy or formality. This was a game of chess or perhaps, Chicken.
Once we’d finished decorating our mailbags and washed down the sweets with milk, the teacher would announce that it was time to ‘mail’ our cards. Hiding our giddiness as best we could, we’d go around the classroom dropping cards into each other’s mailbags, never keeping our eyes too far off our own, and never directly crossing paths with the one who made our heart beat a little bit faster.
As an adult, I’ve not been big on ritualized celebrations (I can’t remember the last time I scheduled a birthday party for myself). The same is true for Valentine’s Day, which hasn’t occupied much of my consciousness whether single or in a relationship. I’ve never been one to post #happysinglesawareness day or celebrate #galentinesday, or to feel particularly lonely when unpartnered on the 14th. I’ve also never been one to plan an elaborate romantic date when in a relationship or feel sad if my partner hasn’t done something special for me. And surprisingly for someone who likes to have a go at capitalism, I don’t even rant about how the holiday is a consumerist ploy to trick us into spending money (if you don’t buy your partner flowers, do you even love them?!). It tends to pass like any other day, unnoticed and unregistered as a day of any real importance.
This year, though, the mood feels tender and somewhat melancholy. I suspect part of this has to do with living in Britain, where the sky varies from grey to greyer, and the temperature ranges from unbearable to just about bearable when wrapped in blankets and a hot water bottle. But I think the rhythm of my life right now—living from petsit to petsit—has me thinking about how love often sits alongside grief.
I think this is something we feel at a young age, even if we can’t put words to it.
As it turns out, I was a catch in 5th grade. When I returned to my desk after handing out my Valentine’s cards, I discovered not only special cards in my mailbag but several boxes of chocolates too big to fit in the bag, too. One of these was in the shape of a red heart from a boy named Cody, who was new to our school that year from Hawaii. Cody had bleached tips à la Backstreet Boys, wore a puka shell necklace, and would send his friends over to me during recess to tell me he liked me. (The two of us never had a conversation of our own.) With the chocolates, he also gave me a beaded lavender choker with a silk ribbon fastening and a handwritten card asking to be his Valentine.
Unfortunately for Cody, the crush was not reciprocated.
After school that day, his friend (and messenger) Raymond asked me, ‘So, did you accept?’ I didn’t understand what he was asking me. ‘Accept what?’ ‘The necklace! Did you accept?’ I was then told that if I kept (‘accepted’) the necklace, it meant that I liked Cody, too. It never occurred to me that the gift wasn’t just mine to take, but apparently there was this whole secret Valentine’s protocol.
I knew what I had to do.
In what I remember as our first ever conversation, I went up to Cody and told him that I couldn’t accept the necklace, and that I was sorry. It’s the first time I remember turning a boy down, and the first time I knowingly made a boy cry.
I suppose it’s true that unrequited love hurts because rejection feels like a judgment on your personal worth. But in my experience, it’s more to do with the realization that whatever future you had envisioned for yourself will never come to fruition. And that version of you that existed in that imaginary life has been taken from you, too, not just the person you imagined by your side. Although I can’t speak for Cody, I imagine he pictured himself sitting next to me at lunch with his arm around me. But with the jewelry back in his hands, his happily ever after, eating packed lunches and sipping juice next to me, was never to be.
In my early twenties after the end to a brief but passionate romance, a life I had quickly built up and furnished in my imagination came crashing down. Nowadays, I’m embarrassed by how intensely I had plotted my move across the globe to be with someone who, in hindsight, could not be more incompatible with who I am today. Still, at the time, I felt like a beautiful life I had cultivated in my mind’s eye had been stolen from me. And so had a version of Rachel. One who lived a Kosher life, lived in a warm climate, spoke multiple languages, and ate hummus for breakfast, amongst other things.
To deal with my grief (and yes, with breakups comes grief), I decided to write four-line prose poems for every person I could remember kissing or crushing on. The idea was that I could put my current feelings into perspective and prove that I’d moved beyond heartbreak before, as well as futures for myself that I’d once been invested in. For each person, I wrote my initial impression of them, what life I imagined living together, when we first kissed, and when I last saw them. In the end, what materialized was not a poetry collection of love or even heartbreak. Instead, what emerged was a tribute not only to my ability to feel deeply and move beyond loss, but to my capacity for regeneration, renewal, and imagination. What I saw was my openness to discovering and creating different life paths, my adventurousness, and my embrace of the many possible routes this one life has to offer. The boys, in the end, were pretty irrelevant to my ability to dream up new lives.
My current life as a petsitter exists at this intersection of love, grief, and possibilities. Five-ish months ago, my partner and I moved out of our flat in Oxford to pet and housesit together. I was just about finished with my postdoc, and my partner was just about to embark on the job hunt after finishing his PhD. Petsitting—caring for someone’s pet(s) in exchange for a place to live while the pet owners are away—was a creative solution to our problem of not having a flat or an income, while also enabling us to move around, explore new places, and travel after a long academic stint in Oxford (I’d lived there for nearly a decade, the longest I’ve lived anywhere as an adult). Since embarking on this journey, we’ve gone from London to the South of France to Sheffield, from cramped high-rise flats to villas with outdoor pools to a crooked, cozy house that can only be described as the Weasley residence. We’ve asked ourselves, could we live here? In this city? In this kind of home? What kind of jobs would we need to sustain a lifestyle in this place? Would that make us happy? But each petsit has an expiry date, of course. Just when you’ve bonded and formed attachments with the animals, it’s time to leave and grieve them. And just when you’ve imagined this life as your own, you remember you were just trying it on for size, and you still haven’t landed on one of your own.
At sleepovers at my friend Kelly’s house when we were younger, my group of girlfriends and I would play with a Ouija board. We’d ask it questions like, ‘Which one of us will be the first to get married? Who will be the last to have kids?’ and, ‘What’s the first letter of the person’s name I’ll marry?’
Now, at the age of 34, I have answers to many of the questions we used to ask spirits while drinking cans of Dr. Pepper through red licorice straws. Out of that friend group, only two of us have yet to be married and have kids, and it looks like I’m the only one who doesn’t want to be a parent, in the end. I used to think that there was some external force who knew the answer to these big questions, as though my life were pre-ordained and I were simply uncovering my destiny as the years unfolded. Of course, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that it isn’t the case at all. We make choices, and life follows. I should have known this all along, given that I secretly guided the Ouija planchette to the answers I wanted for myself (it wasn’t an accident that it always landed on ‘M,’ the letter for my first crush, when asking who I’d end up with).
What I’m just starting to see is that choices—even ones made for and with love—carry grief, too. Because saying yes to one life often means shutting the door to another. These lost lives we’ve imagined for ourselves are ones we carry with us, privately. There was the Rachel who accepted Cody’s necklace, the Rachel who never left California, the Rachel who pursued acting, the Rachel who studied math instead of philosophy, the Rachel who had a family of her own, the Rachel who stayed in Oxford to become a research fellow, and all of the other Rachels who only I know. There is also the Rachel who sits here writing this essay who chose not to live out those lives. Who is scared shitless at the vastness of possibilities still in front of her, but is also grappling with no longer being the girl completely clueless about how her life will shape up. Who, for the first time, is plotting what life she wants with a partner in real time as they grieve the many lives they leave behind.
This Valentine’s day, I want to hold space for grief and love and possibilities to coexist. I see new moms holding their babies close to their chests while also mourning their former lives when time was their own. I see couples holding hands in a new place they’ve made home, separated by oceans from their families. I see friends ending relationships that were heading down paths they no longer wanted to walk down, wondering where to turn next. And here we all are at this junction where love, loss, and futures find each other. At this junction, there’s room for friction and harmony. For loving the lives we’ve chosen, grieving the lives we didn’t take up, and imagining the future lives that maybe one day we’ll meet.
Love, Rachel
Feel free to share this in someone’s Valentine mailbag, so to speak, if you think they’d like it <3. Comments are on, as always.