Can You Stop Loving Someone?

For a while, I was engaged to someone I didn’t marry. On Valentine's Day, he created a path of rose petals for me to follow. I would have followed him to the ends of the earth at the time, but in the end, I married someone else.

During Covid, my daughters were tasked with clearing out the things they didn’t want from our garage. It was deep COVID-19, and we were in full quarantine because, being trendsetters, we were the first to get COVID-19 in our town. Our pediatrician was ecstatic. She feared the tests didn’t work because she had not yet had a positive result. We called her because my daughter had lost her sense of smell. We were not very sick, but as a precaution, we had our food delivered and didn’t leave the house even to walk the dog for three solid weeks.

During this time, my daughters sat in lawn chairs in the garage, drinking Corona beers out of the bottle with lime in the afternoon and reading my love letters. Needless to say, they didn’t get much done in terms of sorting their own high school memorabilia, but they sure had fun with mine. As sport, they would look up the authors of the love letters on the internet. I can’t say that this was not an amusing way to spend an afternoon.

There were also beautiful letters from their father in testimony to a love that went the distance, but the other letters were equally intense. What makes love last? And, do we ever truly stop loving someone we have deeply loved in the past?

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Happy Valentine's Day.