StoryWorth: Valentines
If you could go anywhere and do anything, what would your perfect Valentine’s Day be?
Valentine’s Day, in particular, isn’t that big a deal for me. We often don’t go out that evening, because-as a friend put it-it’s amateur night at all the fine dining establishments. In general my ideal for the night is to go for a walk together, have a lovely meal one way or another, and do something story-worthy.
I’ve had a few Valentine’s Days that were particularly memorable:
My worst breakup happened in January and left me feeling deeply defeated. The relationship I’d spent three years in ended very badly when I dumped him for the guy he’d pushed me to have sex with, only to be dumped in turn three weeks later when that guy decided to stay with the girlfriend who had pushed him into having sex with me, and my original boyfriend had already moved on to the woman who left her husband for him. I ended up crashing with friends for a few months and being congratulated by people who’d never liked my boyfriend for having something I’d poured myself into for three years come crashing down.
Valentine’s Day was approaching and I was feeling really low when a friend from college, also single at the time, proposed that the two of us go out to dinner together that night. We spent a marvelous evening at Helmand, an Afghani restaurant in Cambridge, eating and drinking delicious things, bitching about men as we laughed up a storm, and eventually deciding that we would look for a place to live together. After weeks of feeling defeated and broken, that night I began to really believe I could build a new life for myself.
A couple of years ago my husband and I had rehearsal on the night itself, so we celebrated a couple of days early. We went to the Tasting Counter-one of my very favorite restaurants at the moment-and had a divine multicourse tasting dinner with sublime wine pairings. When that wrapped up we checked the movie listings and decided to see Dead Pool, which was opening that night. So we spent the first part of the evening in hushed, refined sybaritism, and the latter part howling in laughter at Ryan Reynolds’ crude antics. It was a glorious night!
But the most significant Valentine’s Day was the first I spent with Jason. We had been together only a few months and after a couple of years of being mostly-single I was still pretty tender around the idea of the holiday, not wanting to make a big deal of it and not wanting to do anything canonical. I noticed that Neil Gaiman, whom both of us liked and neither of us had seen at that point, was doing a reading at the Palace of Fine Arts that night.
So after dinner at my house we drove into the city and took our places in the darkened auditorium. Neil is a marvelous reader, particularly of his own stories, which tend to have a dark, wry humor even as they are horrifying you, or wrenching at your emotions. One of the stories he read that night was “The Wedding Present,” a story that is hidden in the Introduction of a collection of his short stories called Smoke and Mirrors, as a treat for people who read introductions.
It’s about a couple who receive an envelope at their wedding that tells the story of their relationship, magically getting longer as the years pass, but a darker, twisted alternate version where everything that goes well and right in their real lives, doesn’t, and the story-versions become increasingly unhappy with each other and with themselves. I won’t give away the ending for those who’ve yet to read it, but it’s a beautiful story of some loves being worth the pain. In the car afterward we cried together and I said that I thought we might love that deeply and Jason said that he already did. We’ve seen Neil read many times since then and it’s always a lovely experience, but that one-well, that was Valentine’s Day.
This entry was originally posted at https://lillibet.dreamwidth.org/1317250.html. You can comment either place! There are
comments over there now.
Valentine’s Day, in particular, isn’t that big a deal for me. We often don’t go out that evening, because-as a friend put it-it’s amateur night at all the fine dining establishments. In general my ideal for the night is to go for a walk together, have a lovely meal one way or another, and do something story-worthy.
I’ve had a few Valentine’s Days that were particularly memorable:
My worst breakup happened in January and left me feeling deeply defeated. The relationship I’d spent three years in ended very badly when I dumped him for the guy he’d pushed me to have sex with, only to be dumped in turn three weeks later when that guy decided to stay with the girlfriend who had pushed him into having sex with me, and my original boyfriend had already moved on to the woman who left her husband for him. I ended up crashing with friends for a few months and being congratulated by people who’d never liked my boyfriend for having something I’d poured myself into for three years come crashing down.
Valentine’s Day was approaching and I was feeling really low when a friend from college, also single at the time, proposed that the two of us go out to dinner together that night. We spent a marvelous evening at Helmand, an Afghani restaurant in Cambridge, eating and drinking delicious things, bitching about men as we laughed up a storm, and eventually deciding that we would look for a place to live together. After weeks of feeling defeated and broken, that night I began to really believe I could build a new life for myself.
A couple of years ago my husband and I had rehearsal on the night itself, so we celebrated a couple of days early. We went to the Tasting Counter-one of my very favorite restaurants at the moment-and had a divine multicourse tasting dinner with sublime wine pairings. When that wrapped up we checked the movie listings and decided to see Dead Pool, which was opening that night. So we spent the first part of the evening in hushed, refined sybaritism, and the latter part howling in laughter at Ryan Reynolds’ crude antics. It was a glorious night!
But the most significant Valentine’s Day was the first I spent with Jason. We had been together only a few months and after a couple of years of being mostly-single I was still pretty tender around the idea of the holiday, not wanting to make a big deal of it and not wanting to do anything canonical. I noticed that Neil Gaiman, whom both of us liked and neither of us had seen at that point, was doing a reading at the Palace of Fine Arts that night.
So after dinner at my house we drove into the city and took our places in the darkened auditorium. Neil is a marvelous reader, particularly of his own stories, which tend to have a dark, wry humor even as they are horrifying you, or wrenching at your emotions. One of the stories he read that night was “The Wedding Present,” a story that is hidden in the Introduction of a collection of his short stories called Smoke and Mirrors, as a treat for people who read introductions.
It’s about a couple who receive an envelope at their wedding that tells the story of their relationship, magically getting longer as the years pass, but a darker, twisted alternate version where everything that goes well and right in their real lives, doesn’t, and the story-versions become increasingly unhappy with each other and with themselves. I won’t give away the ending for those who’ve yet to read it, but it’s a beautiful story of some loves being worth the pain. In the car afterward we cried together and I said that I thought we might love that deeply and Jason said that he already did. We’ve seen Neil read many times since then and it’s always a lovely experience, but that one-well, that was Valentine’s Day.
This entry was originally posted at https://lillibet.dreamwidth.org/1317250.html. You can comment either place! There are
comments over there now.