David Levithan - 19 Love Songs

I wake up with my face against Yoda’s, my arm gently across Obi-Wan Kenobi. I take in the Star Wars sheets, the Star Wars blanket, the lightsaber lamp beside my bed. I have never seen any of the Star Wars movies, so this is all very strange to me. As I sit up in bed against a robot I will later learn to call a droid, I do my mental morning exercise, figuring out that my name is Jason today and that this is my bedroom. My mother’s room is on the other side of the wall; from the silence, I assume she’s still sleeping.

I know it’s Valentine’s Day because yesterday was the day before Valentine’s Day. I watched yesterday’s sister decorating her cards, putting extra glitter on the one belonging to her crush. She let me put stickers on the cards she cared less about, hearts I laid out in haphazard trails. I tried to imagine each kid opening his or her envelope, knowing full well I would be gone by the time they were delivered.

Now I get up and walk to the mirror. I don’t really pay attention to what I look like, but I do stare for a good long time at the pattern on my pajamas. If you’ve never seen Wookiees dancing before, it’s a very confusing sight.

On my desk, I find a dozen sealed white envelopes, each the size of a playing card. They are all addressed to MOM , the O s shaped into hearts.

It’s as if Jason has left me an assignment. I gather the stack in my hand and leave the room.

Holidays were important to me when I was young, because they were the only days almost everyone could agree upon. In school, there would always be a lead-up, the anticipation gathering into a frenzy as the day grew closer and closer. With Valentine’s Day, the world grew progressively red and pink as February began. It was a bright spot in a cold time, a holiday that didn’t ask much more of me than to eat candy and think about love.

Because of this, I liked it a lot.

Jason’s room is clearly his home base—the rest of the apartment holds fewer representatives from outside our universe. It isn’t a large place—just the two bedrooms wedged together with a kitchen and a den. Big enough for two people, but I feel it’s meant for at least one more.

I try to stay quiet—over the years, I’ve learned to wake a parent only if it’s really, really important. Back before I realized I was waking into a different life each morning, I stormed carelessly into my various parents’ bedrooms, no matter what time it was. Most told me to go back to bed. Some used it as an excuse to get up. And enough lashed out at me that I stopped doing it, terrified that I’d landed in the wrong kind of life, and that my excitement at being awake would be used against me.

On tiptoe steps, I enter the kitchen and find a valentine wonderland awaiting me. The room is aswarm with hearts—dropping from the ceiling, constellated across the cabinets, blooming from the countertop. There have to be hundreds of them, and to my eight-year-old eye, it looks like thousands. They peek out from drawers, scale the refrigerator, conga across the floor. In the silence of my sleeping, my mother has constructed this for me. There are hearts popping out of the toaster. Hearts running away with the spoons. Hearts swimming above napkins and hopscotching the paper towels.

I can’t help but pick one up, feel the red paper between my fingers. Already, the heart in my hand is forming a personality in my head. This heart—a little squat, a little heavier on the left side—is a bit slower than the rest, but he tells good jokes. I name him Bruno. (I don’t know where the name comes from; it’s probably the dog or cat from a house I once lived in, the name all that remains in my memory.) Immediately, Bruno makes two friends, Sally and Lucy. They talk a valentine language, but luckily I can translate it into English.

This is how my mother finds me nearly an hour later: at the kitchen table, building a jungle gym for my new friends. Celery for a slide. Broccoli to climb. Carrot sticks at fort-making angles. Bruno still has center stage, but the cast of characters has grown to at least a dozen. I believe I know them well.

“Happy Valentine’s Day!” my mother says.

Years later, I will remember her voice. I will remember the way she said it. With chime-like clarity, announcing that this is indeed a special day, and that even though I have done nothing to deserve it but be myself, it all belongs to me.

In my haste to get lost in the heart-world I’ve conjured, I’ve forgotten to put out the envelopes Jason left. I’ve stashed them in a corner, by the gremlin-grumbling base of the refrigerator. Now I scoot down from my chair to retrieve them. I have not touched the larger pink envelope I found with my name on it on the kitchen table. I knew to wait until Mom woke up before opening it.

My mother goes to the cupboard and reaches for something on a shelf I can’t imagine ever being able to reach. A few hearts fall as the door swings, but they make a soft landing. Two red-wrapped boxes emerge in her hands. I wonder how long they’ve been up there, and at the same time I could just as easily believe they’ve appeared at this very moment.

It is just the two of us, giants in the world of hearts. It is just the two of us, together in a small kitchen on a Sunday morning. It is just the two of us, and now I am handing over my twelve envelopes and she is handing over the red-wrapped boxes, accompanied by the pink-clad card.

It is a trick I’ve learned, to feel as if a card is for me even if it’s really addressed to the person I am that day. This is the only way I stop myself from falling through the fabric of everyday life. When I was a child, I could make myself believe that the words and the love behind them were always meant for me. Especially if I saw the expression of love in the eyes of the person who was giving the card to me.

As my mother opens her envelopes, I can see I’ve given her a whole pack of Star Wars valentines, providing each character with his or her own elaborate autograph. The card for me, meanwhile, has a pack of walruses on it, making the shape of a heart on an ice floe. (I have to look closely to make sure they’re not Wookiees.) In the first red box my mother has given me, I find a red scarf. In the second red box, I find a pair of red mittens.

When you get older, red becomes more complicated, just as hearts become more complicated. But back then, the world was far from a bloody, angry, embarrassing thing. Red had one meaning, and that meaning was love. There in the kitchen, I wrap myself in it, I clothe myself in it, and I’m sure that my smile is just as red as the mittens, and the heart in my chest is just as red as the scarf.

My mother holds up a card with a masked figure on it. The caption reads, May you HUNT up a BOUNTY of HEARTS.

“I think this is my favorite,” she tells me. “Boba Fett’s a real romantic, isn’t he?”

I have no idea what she’s talking about, but I nod earnestly, which only makes her smile more.

“So what shall we do with our Valentine’s Day? Maybe some valentine waffles to start?”

She has a heart-shaped cookie cutter at the ready, and uses it to force some Eggos into the holiday spirit. As she does, she hums a song I don’t know. I want to sing along, but I can’t. Most of the songs I’ve learned in school involve grand old flags and amber waves of grain. None seem to apply to this moment.

She tries to shape the butter into hearts, but it doesn’t quite work. The syrup, however, allows itself a heart-shaped pour. I almost don’t want to eat the waffles, they seem so loving.

I think my mother senses I’m on the verge of giving the waffles names. “Go ahead,” she says, now making two for herself. “Before they get cold.”

She turns on the radio, and we’re serenaded by commercials and forecasts. Sitting at the kitchen table, I am reminded how households with only two people have a different kind of gravity than others. We need the background noise, because otherwise the burden is entirely on us. And at the same time, there isn’t that much of a burden, because we are used to the two-person rhythm of things, the constant awareness of one another without much needing to be said. We are the only objects exerting any gravitational pull on our attentions. The pull has some slack to it, some give.