Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day is quite different from the other occasions we celebrate-because it is difficult to tell who’s in the realm of love, who embraces the joy of friendship, who is in oblivion, who backs away from it. There is a suppressed joy that swims with ambiguity as you stare at faces of portraits, portraits and portraits that hint, and provoke your curiosity. You slip and almost smile, but you maneuver the curve, you put it on a standstill. It is a day that requires guesswork. Occasionally, it is blatantly obvious: you see a beaming lady with a bouquet sitting shyly in that bag beside her foot which she smiles at every six seconds, or the grinning man with a small box in his hands. You walk, look and turn in circles, unable to decipher the colour and texture of these other portraits. How about the housewife at the side painted with a colour fatigue, or this man, bespectacled, with a bagpack, with his thick coursepack, he stares at you for a moment, and you have that two-ninth of a moment to work out if he hangs Cupid by his heart. So, you carry that smile in a freeze.
You continue walking, and the canvases morph into clothes of colours, dancing with you. In the maze of love songs, flowers a thousand, pressures, there are the triumphant, and those gaping at the triumphant. Snipping the clothes into a thousand pieces, does it crumble such divisions and become all-inclusive?
2 hours past 14th February, when you meet the same people you met yesterday, you look at these paintings differently because the difference of two hours has ordered the way you should think about life now. Because 15th February is an ordinary day, and in this ordinariness, returns an equality.