For The Lovers & The Heartbroken

On Valentine's day, romanticizing heartbreak, and attempting to write happy poems.

Happy Valentine’s Day, little loves. I love Valentine’s Day because I love love and I love longing, and most of all because I love flowers, and all of the labor that comes with the busiest holiday of the year in the floral world.

I also love heartbreak and I love feeling lonely, even when it hurts, which is dramatic and annoying to admit, but it’s true. The last few Valentine’s Days before I met R, I spent working so hard I wouldn’t have to think about the tenderness that was missing from my life, only to drag myself home at the end of the night, and (one year) open Instagram to find the man I was then-infatuated with had posted his new girlfriend. I cried. Then I ate pasta. Then I deleted Instagram and pretended like I didn’t care that no one was there to run me a bath or massage my cracked hands.

Of course it was painful, but I also kind of enjoyed it: moping around my tiny apartment, lighting candles for myself, writing sad poems, á la this excerpt, written about said former crush:

I imagine forgetting him entirely,
the memory of his hands on my body slipping away,
rinsed down the drain with the other grains of sand,
my skin clean.

My mind isn’t a cloud lit up with his voice anymore.
My feet are on solid ground again,
I walk fourteen thousand steps a day
and he doesn’t follow me anywhere.

L. at Solabee in 2018, R. in studio 2019

I was really good at romanticizing my heartbreak. (I’m also good at romanticizing the act of romanticizing the pain, but that’s a newsletter for another day.) Now I’m sitting in the Chicago airport on my way back to Portland to work at that same flower shop. At the end of the week, I’ll be pressed against R’s chest, there is so much tenderness in my life now.

I’ve spent the last few years attempting to write poems about being happy. It’s a lot more challenging than writing the sad ones. There’s a muscle memory to writing poems about heartbreak. It feels cliché to have an easier time channeling sadness than happiness, but what can you do. Sometimes things are cliché for a reason. Finding the words for the feeling of your love being reciprocated feels like walking for the first time. Writing with my left hand. It feels like faking it—like, is this real?

But it is real. It’s profound contentedness, the quiet thrill of finding and loving a person so perfect for me. So, here’s a poem about being happy. I don’t make any claims to its quality, it’s me walking on shaking legs for the first time.

Here’s how it feels to be not crushed by another person:

It feels like taking a deep breath and thinking you’ve expanded your lungs as far as they go and then realizing that all along you’ve only been half-inhaling, that there is so much more empty space in your chest cavity than you ever knew

It feels like taking a chilled shot that goes down smoothly, only a hint of vodka on your exhale and the liquid doesn’t catch on that one knot that’s never untangled itself from your throat

It feels like no knots, ever

It feels like driving in a car with the sunroof down and the air outside is the same temperature as the air inside and there is no urge to speak to fill a void

It feels like your emotions running smoothly through you, tears down cheeks and laugh bubbling up and the creases between your eyebrows are only there because something has genuinely puzzled you

It feels like shifting into 2nd gear without any lurch at all

It feels like writing as fast as you think

It feels like the sweet practiced currents as you move around a kitchen making dinner, with a jazz record spinning in the background, as one person chops onions and another pushes them around the sizzling pan, hands on the small of your back, kisses pressed to the nape of necks, spaghetti twirled around forks as the end of the record clicks rhythmically against the voices at the table

L. 26 days after we met, R. us photographed by Joy Newell, the day R proposed

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Unrelated things I’m loving from the real world:

• The best book I’ve read recently—The Cook by Maylis de Kerangal, is a short novella that’s for you if you like poetry, food, and the show The Bear. (Target audience: me & Robbie)

• I’ve been completely obsessed with the podcast Goes Without Saying, hosted by two twenty-something British girls named Sephy and Wing. It’s the perfect blend of chatty, funny, heartwarming, with just the right amount of unpretentious tagents. Listening to it feels like hanging out with my friends. Start with a recent one: how to ‘everything shower’ your mind: therapy dupe?

• PerfumeTok introduced me to Chris Rusak, a small-batch perfumer who releases limited edition scents that are conceptual and weird. I love his sensibilities. It’s not often that I impulse purchase, but I ordered his sample set after spending like five minutes on his website.

• Related to that, if you ever feel uninspired and flat, I recommend going to Fragrantica and reading perfume reviews. It’s so weirdly inspiring and funny to read peoples attempt to describe scents. Here’s a snipped of a review for one of Chris Rusak’s perfumes:
  
  

  “This scent hits the memory centres of the brain hard, but it's like a memory you don't have, like you're a replicant from Blade Runner and this memory has been implanted in you and you can't fix it to a real time and place but, nevertheless, there it is every time you catch a whiff of the fragrance from your wrist or beard, tugging at your imaginary past.”

Lastly—

At the end of January I listed my (Today is) paintings from 2023 for sale! And I sold some! (Many more than I expected to sell.) I could probably write a whole other newsletter on what it feels like to finally, finally be selling my art. If you want to own one, find them here.

xoxoxo

B