Some fools think of happiness, blissfulness, togetherness; some fools fool themselves I guess

Oh, Valentines Day, my old nemesis. I have a long and tortured history of truly terrible Valentines Days. Maybe it's karma. Maybe Cupid shot me with an arrow some years ago and I retaliated by cutting him because I'm a street smart city girl. Who knows? What I do know is that it sucks almost every year.

Last year was relatively uneventful, but only because I was in hiding after a New Years breakup. The year before, my live in boyfriend gave me anti-aging cream. The year before that, he stood me up (a red flag that I ignored, naturally). I have had a fiance give me slippers on Valentines Day and the most memorably bad V-day was the year my boyfriend gave me money in a card. Money. In a card. Forty dollars, to be exact. Two twenties.

This year is no different. For this year, two days before Valentines Day, my on again off again went permanently off. And by off, I mean off the rails, careening down a cliff face and bursting into a ball of flames. There were no survivors.

What is better than the timing is the method of delivery. Oh yes, I have been dismissed in Arial twelve point font. AGAIN. (It is entirely possible, by the way, that the font is due to my own computer settings and the inevitable comparisons to the last time I was dismissed through typeface were unintentional.)

I should say that the result may as well have been pre-ordained and was likely unavoidable. But the timing and delivery method are brutal to the point of comedy.

So what can you do but laugh? Well, cry. I've done my share of that. Other possible reactions include quitting photography class, drinking too much, crying inappropriately on the shoulder of a friend whose own recent breakup makes mine look about as serious as a splinter, and running home to my mother. All have been considered. Some rejected, I won't say which.

You know, I get asked a lot how I do it, living so far away, isolated from my closest friends and family. And I don't know, really. It's a lot like working without a net. Most of the time it doesn't matter - you just don't look down. Keep your eye on the prize, whatever that is.

And then times like this, when the fall feels so very long and the impact so very hard, I guess I wonder too how I do it. Or how I will do it.

And I suppose, the quote Sleepless in Seattle, I will just get out of bed every day. And breathe in and out.

And soldier on.

I do wonder, sometimes, what my life would have been like if I hadn't run away from being Mrs Kevin Langston, high school French teacher, back in 1996. Whether I would have been happy or, at the very least, secure. Whether the net that came with it would have been a comfort or whether it would have strangled me.

I guess I still think, like I did back then, that it would have been the latter. And that there's a value, sometimes, in being the one in a million who can work without a net.

And perhaps I like to think that, decades from now when my time has come, people will say, 'that Erin. She was so strong.'

But I would be lying if I didn't admit that part of me wishes that when that time comes there would be just one person, a true companion, who said, 'that Erin. God, I loved her so.'