V DAY

It was a sunny cool day in February when I looked at the calendar and realized a special day was arriving to not forget.

I started with a trip to whole foods and picked out a beautiful veal tender along with a bag of fresh asparagus.  It was now time to commence my preparation of my special Escalope de Veau and showcase my culinary skills as my way of demonstrating thoughfulness and love to the woman I have been sharing my Florida home with for the last few months.

As I was pounding the meat to expel all the air, I put the brakes on and made a hard stop and asked myself what am I doing?

V Day is just a contrived made up occasion created by gigantic retailers to sell greeting cards, chocolates, and flowers and I am just conforming to the pressure of all the forces around me.  I enjoy the companionship and friendship but I just don’t feel the love that is expected of me.  By me continuing with this charade I am no better than those hungry retailers and manufacturers whose goal it is to increase revenues and profits for the conformists.

So as I am thinking about this lack of love feeling for this artificially created holiday, I make the terrible fatal mistake of sharing these feelings with my lady friend and now     my life  changes dramatically to a downward spiral.  She takes these honest feelings of mine that I shared and turns them around into hurt, exaggerated emotions that display my lack of caring, selfishness, and unwillingness to love.  She now starts questioning her motives for sharing my house, being in Florida, and especially spending time with me. We never discussed love and I felt I show my so called caring everyday by doing all the food preparations, treating her to a dream life with the only care in the world is to decide which canasta game to attend and what PP activity to sign up for.  I take her to all the PP live shows, and introduced her to a life of joy and contentment.  However, the sharing of these life styles is not enough. 

 Can’t a person just once be honest and share some thoughts without the wheels coming off the bus?

So now I am forced to re-evaluate my deep feelings, and to make my life tolerable and somewhat pleasant I must back fill and reverse these shared inner thoughts.  It is really a sad state of affairs when one cannot be honest and act in accordance with your inner feelings.

I cannot go back and slave over this culinary presentation because the heart is not in it, but I do have to create this illusion of celebrating a holiday that for me at this time has no meaning.

The big question here:  Why can’t I demonstrate the love expected of me?  Wrong woman? wrong time? my internal make up? my selfishness from being an only child? an inability to be deeply in love?  Do I need to figure this out in 5 days?

Valentine’s Day—and I thought I had nothing to write about.

shel