An Honestly Embittered Post:

The gloves are off. The facade torn down. This is honesty. Raw honesty. This is proof that I am human. Cut me and I bleed. Hold me underwater and I drown.

It is the second year in a row that I had thought that I had dodged all of the well-wishers, wishy-washers, and gushers on yet another Valentine's Day massacre, when the terrible realization dawned on me that today, in fact, was not Valentine's Day.

Today even had the perfect set up for the day to the dreaded day: I awoke to thunder and lightning along with tornado warnings. It seemed like something had torn the sky and it poured out it's contents on the earth below. For some strange reason, it was comforting. Maybe it was the hope that rain brings... or maybe it was my amplified negativity toward the day intepretting this as an amusing joke: the sky was cry for something that I cannot find the tears for.

Call me the Grinch of V-day, if you will, I have some very valid reasons why I refuse to even recognize that it exists.

I will reitterate this idea every year... be V-day a holiday of friendship or romanticism, here is a novel idea: why not treat everyone with dignity, respected, and cherish them every day? Guys, it makes me sick how all year long, you can take for granted what you has in your life and automatically redeem yourself (or buy-off) you girl.

And so the same goes the other way around too.

Girls, you are not exempt from this either. You fuel the fires by allowing yourselves duped into it OR worse playing into it like it's a game. The attention must be nice, so must the feeling of beating guys away with sticks.

(Which leads me now to indite myself. Damien, shame on you for being so critical of others and how they chose to celebrate. In your search for vindication, you have become no better.)

When I look at what true love is supposed to be like, nothing about this day reminds me of it. I see commercialism and material expectations. Sure, if must be nice to be showered with affection, but in the long run, the enamel stretches thin and the true nature is revealed: shallowness, selfish motives, etc. I could go on forever with the bitter list.

I'm really not a hateful person, I just never have liked the day and I probably never will. I'm just tired of it already. Too much pressure. Too many reminders. I will seemingly always have bad days around this time of year. This has never been a holiday of love or friendship to me. This has always been a reminder of loss.

It's funny, just today, I was reading in Ezekiel where God offers this crazy image to Ezekiel of Israel being a beautiful young woman who He did everything for. In the long run, she ended up running off on Him... insatiably searching for more and better. Yet even in His fierce anger, God still remembered the promises that He had made her, refraining from making her drink the wrath which she herself has funished.

I know how that wrath feels and it's not pretty. I know what it is to experience infidelity... I am not an easily angered person, but I have no stomach or tolerance for it. In the measure of patience that God has given me, I have no patience deception.

So what is true love? True love is that we don't get what we have coming to us. True love is patient endurance beyond what I in myself am capable of. True love has nothing to do with this day and just like that, I want nothing to do with it either.