Chasing

"Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved." -Victor Hugo

Last weekend, I decided that I would clean out the bottom of my bed and it was amazing what I found. For all these years, small relics of elementary school have been hiding underneath my bed. I came across letters written in crayon and decorated with glitter, small "secret" notes my friends and I would pass to each other, old diaries, and birthday cards. I also found my old valentines. Thinking about it, it's so silly that I held onto these small sheets of paper with messy scrawls of writing but really they are so precious to me. 

When I received those valentines, Valentine's Day was simply a celebration of love. No one worried about their date or lack thereof. We were all single (well, except for the cool girls...) and it didn't matter at all. We had friendships to celebrate and we couldn't care less about relationships. I sat there in my room thinking about this as I went through the sparkly, aluminum foiled valentines that were the pinnacle of valentine fashion in third grade. Now that I've gotten older, somehow Valentine's Day has been narrowed down to a day where in order to take part in the festivities, you must find that special someone. Movies, TV shows, and adolescence (and sadly adulthood as well) have reclaimed Valentine's Day as a sort of carpe diem day for romantic love.

And it makes you feel kind of crappy when you don't have someone to proclaim your love to.

But I think that's where we go wrong. That's where I've gone wrong. I really think everyone should proclaim some form of love on Valentine's Day. There is this misconception that platonic love holds no depth compared to romantic love. And therefore no worth or place on Valentine's Day. Such silly nonsense. My mother once told me that the people we love the most are the ones we take for the granted the most often. Snow Patrol tries to explain this in their song "Chasing Cars" in the verse:

Those three words,

Are said too much

But not enough. 

We say "I love you" so many times in our lives that it's become such a pliable term that doesn't hold  nearly the same weight that those three words should. Perhaps those words need to be put away for me to truly express how I feel for the people I love in my life. I've constantly heard in my life that actions speak louder than words. But I also think that a new arrangement of words speak louder than worn cliques and phrases. I plan to explore that. 

This Valentine's Day I don't have a Valentine but it doesn't mean that I'm going to be listening to angry love songs, burning past love letters (if I had any), and cutting heads out of pictures. I've got love to celebrate too. And you do as well. 

Let's make the most out of it.