Love

It was Valentine’s Day, the best day of the year in school (second only to Halloween, of course). On Valentine’s Day the tired tasks of math and language arts were set aside and given to an afternoon of crafting the perfect container to hold the day’s wishes delivered later.

White paper bags were provided, and every table was given a stack of doilies and construction paper. Blunt safety scissors and Elmer’s bottles, crusted with dried glue clinging to the orange twist tops, sat in the center of each table. Kids chatted freely about this and that, but Love (named after this day because it was also her birthday) was focused soley on her paper bag.

Love cut and glued her name in large red letters and placed them near the top. She carefully folded the paper in the center then cut perfectly symmetrical hearts along the folded edge. She repeated the steps with red, pink, and white, noticing how adding more hearts to the bag made her’s look fancier. She anticipated how its brightness would call to her from across the room once it was hung up on the rail beneath the chalkboard.

Love was only slightly concerned about how many Valentine’s she’d receive. Honestly, she existed in a state of unobservant-overobservance most of the time. Her classmates always seemed to be communicating on another level about things they had in common, but she was always busy examining a crawling bug, the color of the leaves that had fallen to the ground, or how many times she could spin on the bars without throwing up. Where they would play together at recess, she would walk around the school by herself or sit beneath the little alcove created by the exterior stairs adjacent to the playground and read the book she’d snuck out beneath her sweater. She was alone, but perfectly content in that aloneness, and the only time she felt she was different is when people observed how much time she spent by herself.

For now though, she was entirely immersed in attaching the paper hearts to her Valentine’s mailbox. Her little fingers were covered in a thin skin of glue. Construction paper piled at her feet. How many hearts could she glue onto this bag?

She was determined to find out.