1. You’re sweating and panicked, running all over town searching for flowers.
2. You offer someone your still-beating heart.
3. You are definitely ruining your waiter’s evening.
4. In a wild fit of inspiration, you sit down to write poetry that perfectly encapsulates the experience of love, heartbreak, and human connection. Months later you open your notebook only to find that you’ve drawn an elephant with a bleeding heart impaled on one of his tusks, and you’ve circled it so many times the pen ripped a hole in the page.
5. Candy is speaking directly to you and transmitting cryptic messages.
6. You realize you are alone and so is your spirit, crushing you with the existential terror that you are deeply and irreparably flawed at the cellular level.
7. You expect to find diamonds everywhere. You search on your pillow, in your coat pockets, under that turtle. You frantically dig through a piece of chocolate cake. You grab your waiter by the collar wailing, “I’VE WASTED SEVEN OF MY MOST FERTILE YEARS. WHERE IS THE DIAMOND?!”
8. You’re participating in a late-winter pagan ritual.
9. You’re being hunted. Your hunter is naked, winged, and armed with a bow and arrow. He just wants you to feel love. He also wants to put a dart in your hindquarters.
10. You hate this day because you’ve come to the profound conclusion that society has taken love and romance and commercialized it for profit, that we’ve replaced spontaneous expressions of joy with entitlement and expectation.
11. You’re certain you’re the first person to make this observation, so you begin to pen a scathing op-ed on the commodification of love but ultimately get distracted when your dog’s face melts like a Salvador Dalí clock.
12. You can’t wait for it to be tomorrow.
1-12: Happy Valentine’s Day!
1-12: Drink some water. You’ll come down soon.