Valentines Day Message

 VALENTINES DAY MESSAGE: Every Valentines Day, I think about my girlfriends I had in Europe in the 1980s and how much I miss them and still love both of them.  Lorie was an American girl whose articles I would edit and print in the WSJ/Europe Arts and Letters Page.  She wrote a lovely piece about Lloyd Cole.  I would visit Laurie in Paris and we would take the longest of walks together and dine in cheap restaurants with exquisite food: I remember her fondly next to the merry-go-round near the Eiffel Tower (and inspiration for one of my stories).  But I turned her off when I took her to a Front 242 concert in Brussels; we cooled after that (still love the group, though).  She eventually got married to a French guy.  I was always so jealous of her Parisian accent though she was American: she was so brilliant and yet so gone.

Bernadette was a young girl from Lebanon I met drinking at Rick's Cafe American in Brussels.  In the downstairs bar.  I was smoking at the time and she gave me a silver lighter as a memento.  We eventually fell in love, very passionate, very intense, though I didn't know how much I was in love at the time.  I was never quite there in Europe: too much alcohol.  She loved it when I tried to pronounce Arabic words off her.  I loved it that she spoke three languages, all pretty fluently too.  I remember taking her to Ostend off the case in summer: we saw Purple Rain and she thought Prince was the Devil!!! She had a Catholic religious side, as do I, if hers was more sensual and warm and mine was perverted by the Mother Whore complex.  Sadly and stupidly, I broke it off with her after Abby (see my short story By the Book ... please) told me she was after my green card.  Too bad, I think Bernadette's dad was some rich oil executive who was financing her travels around Europe.  She went off to Barcelona and my heart is broken. 

After that, in Chicago, all is bleak and grim when it comes to romance.  I have had no girlfriends here.  I have no idea why that is.  I have crushes that don't pan out; wispy infatuations.  I have friends who are girls, one of them died in August and I will never stop mourning her, because literature flowed through our hearts and souls, though she may have not known that.  She fell victim to gaslighting and Covid fatigue over her tragically closed bookstore.  One of my friend's mom died because of Covid on January 1 and so she traveled to Austin: she's my writing buddy, very influential.

But romance?  Nope, not with Chicago women, though a girl who was a waitress at Kopi Cafe once kissed my hand when she was drunk, but she was from somewhere in the South.  

But Japanese women, they really intrigue me.  But too much from a distance.  The lead singer of Babymetal who always gives me the eye in concert because there is something about my Hiroshima Toyo Carp baseball hat that attracts her, aside from that it is obviously her favorite hometown team. (And here's a guy wearing it in Chicago ... the ONLY guy, she's thinking.)  And both women from FEMM grew rather close to me in July and December of 2019: we regularly tweet each other and I have a strange bond with them. 

So I am not much for Valentine's Day, WTF.  I go through the motions, I try to keep it funny, but eventually it's Joy Division's Heart and Soul, because one must burn.