David Levithan - 19 Love Songs

After the waffles are gone, I head back to my room and play some more with the hearts, letting them explore the Millennium Falcon and some sketches Jason has made of the Death Star.

As I do this, my mother washes the dishes, then goes to her room to do other things I don’t notice. When she emerges again in my doorway, she has a bottle of pink liquid in her hands.

“How about a strawberry bubble bath?” she asks.

I am not going to argue with that. I watch, hearts in hand, as she draws the bath, checking to make sure the water isn’t too cold and isn’t too hot. When it’s just right, she pours the pink in, and I watch the bubbles race to the surface. She leaves me alone to submerge myself into strawberry-scented oblivion. My thoughts wander, but not to a place where I can follow them. I turn the bubbles into peaks, into clouds that I toss into the air. It doesn’t occur to me to wash myself. It’s as if I believe the steam will evaporate me into being clean.

From the bathtub, I can hear my mother walking around the apartment. Every now and then, she asks if everything is okay, and I let her know I’m good. Finally she suggests it might be time for me to get out of the tub. I have already used the tap to add more hot water, and the bubbles are starting to wear thin. So I rise from the tub, a foamy tempest, and then towel myself off and get dressed in a red shirt and green jeans. I wish I had red socks and sneakers, too.

I remember this. I remember all of this.

The next thing I remember, we are walking in the zoo. I know we must have talked about going there. I know we must have driven. But those were everyday acts, and I’m sure I didn’t even hold on to them at the time they were happening. The zoo, however, is different. I have been here before, with other parents, on a field trip. And I’m sure Jason has been here before, too, since his mother doesn’t offer much in the way of tour guidance. Instead she brings Valentine’s Day with her. I remember her pink scarf. I remember my red mittens. I remember us making our way to the mother panda and the baby panda, and I remember the story my mother tells me about how they’re going to spend Valentine’s Day. After everyone’s gone—after even the guards go off to do other things, like check the giraffes—the pandas are going to have a party, just the two of them. They are going to sip pink lemonade through bamboo straws and share heart-shaped chocolates they’ve ordered all the way from China. I listen to her tell me all this, rapt, and then ask her wonder-filled questions: Will they play music at this party? Do they give each other cards? Are the chocolates the kind with fillings, or are they chocolate through and through? Do pandas like the peanut butter ones the best, like I do? My mother has an answer for each and every question.

I watch the pandas and smile. Even though they’re chewing bamboo, even though they aren’t really paying attention to us, I know their secret plans. Even though I know they’re bears, just like the bears you have to be afraid of in the woods, when I look at them, all I can see is softness. I want to give them valentines. I want to buy them red licorice for their party, even if it ends up being from CVS, not China.

At eight, I still let myself believe, because it’s more fun and welcoming to believe. The older I get, the more I will feel I have to assert my logic, the more I’ll feel I have to prove that stories are lies. Or at least until I reach the point when I appreciate stories again, until I reach the point when I realize how they help me live my life. At eight, I am on the cusp. I am sure there are so many things about Jason, about Jason’s mother, about the pandas in their pen, that I’m not seeing. But his mother’s love is strong enough that I don’t care about what I’m not seeing. Instead I want to live in the story of what is there.

The pandas don’t get the red licorice, but I do. When we leave the zoo, we go on a hunt for pink lemonade, and when we find it, I use my licorice as a straw, pretending it’s bamboo. When we go for lunch, I don’t notice any of the couples around us. I don’t measure our day against theirs. In due time, I will see the day as a conspiracy to milk romantics of their rose money. But that’s not how I learned it. That isn’t how any of us learn it. Our first valentines are never from someone we’re dating or have a crush on. Our first valentines are always like this.

My mother convinces the amused waitress to convince the chef to make our pizza so the red will be on top, the cheese underneath. When it arrives at our table, the chef has even added red peppers, shaped in a heart. I am delighted. (A wonderful word for a wonder-filled feeling, delighted. )

I can coast on my excitement for a while, but by the time we get home, I’m tired. I don’t remember napping, but I must nap, because I remember waking up. I remember it being light out, but just barely. I play for a few minutes with Bruno, Sally, and Lucy, and introduce them to Chewbacca, Han Solo, and C-3PO—although, not knowing these guys’ true names, I call them Rex, Harry, and Goldie, respectively. They are planning a valentine party of their own. Chewbacca Rex is a little in love with Sally, but Sally has no idea. Bruno is secretly jealous. Goldie C-3PO consoles him.

When the story has played out for as long as my attention span will allow, I decide to leave my bedroom. Quietly, I venture toward the kitchen, probably to retrieve more of Bruno, Sally, and Lucy’s heart-shaped friends. When I get to the doorway, I see my mom inside, but she doesn’t see me.

Here my memory takes hold. Here I contradict my earlier statement, because isn’t this an everyday moment, too? Why do I end up remembering it so many years later—why do I remember this woman, who I only know for one day? She is sitting at the kitchen table. A pink-frosted cake sits in front of her, the container of frosting still on the table beside it. She has a bag of candy hearts open, and she has been putting them onto the cake. I have caught her pausing in the middle of this task. A small green candy heart is held between her thumb and finger. The bag is right by her wrist. But she isn’t looking at the bag, or at the cake, or at me in the hall. She is looking at something that isn’t there. She is looking at nothing at all. She is seeing something without looking. She is in the room and she isn’t in the room. She is lost in her own private universe, a vast and small place that I can only see as it’s reflected in her body. It is not sadness I see. I would understand sadness. I see, instead, what an adult looks like when she is unmoored from gravity. When she forgets what gravity is like. When the pull of other universes is so faint that there is only the private universe left.

I remember this so well because one day I will understand it. What’s important isn’t what I notice—it’s this recognition beneath, and what comes next. Because the minute she sees me, gravity returns. The minute she sees me, the private universe expands. The minute she sees me, she comes back. And I think: love . I know then, without being able to articulate it, that love is the gravity.

She asks me if I want to finish decorating the cake. I ask her who it’s for. She tells me it’s for us . . . and Boba Fett, if he drops by.

I don’t want Boba Fett to drop by.

We eat two slices of the cake, and I’m sure we eat dinner, too. Afterwards, I help with the dishes and steal fingerfuls of icing from the cake that remains. Pink frosting is, to me, toothpaste’s super fun cousin. My mother, however, will not allow me to brush with what’s left.

Instead I am asked to use the less fun cousin before I change back into my Wookiee wear and jump into bed. I am not tired, not tired at all, but then my mother comes in and says she’ll read to me for a little while. I don’t remember what book it was—it almost doesn’t matter, because the sensation of being read to is so much more powerful than any individual story. Easing myself into her words allows me to loosen my grip on the fierce wakefulness I’d proclaimed when she entered the room. When she finishes, I am nearly in a dream state. But not quite, because I still remember her turning out the light, and then, by the glow of an R2-D2-shaped night-light, singing me off to sleep.