The Valentine

Photo credit:valentine.org

I tried not to write any story on Valentine’s day but being a hopeless romantic, I couldn’t help myself even though it's coming five days after.

I have a lot of stories to tell on my Val’s day experiences in those days when Amaka was a girl.

I remember riding on a motorcycle in the dead of the night on a dangerous edgy road all for love.(I'll spare you the details) As a young girl, I wouldn’t say that Valentine's day meant much to me but I followed the band wagon just to appear normal.

The fuss was always too much for me and I felt shame for the girls who carried their Valentine’s gifts openly and shamelessly for all to see. The most annoying part was that the gifts were always uniform; either a red or white teddy bear with a red bow tie or a mug or at best a box of chocolate covered in shiny red gift wraps. 

There were many sensless gifts and the best any girl got in those days were lingeries, foot wears or dresses. 

The most ridiculous gift I ever saw that a girl gave to her boyfriend who was old enough to be her father though single was a bowl of floating candles.

She was quite annoyed with me when I did not share in her excitement and couldn’t easily grasp what she meant by floating candles.

She went on to explain how the guy would unwrap the gift and then fill the bowl with water and then gently place the miniature candles in the bowl of water to float. The bowl was white and the candles red; I laughed at the imagination that his friends would think that he had joined a get-rich-quick secret society.

I will never forget how I tried to impress Victor in those days since every girl seemed to be doing something for their significant others. I bought him two shirts that I could afford, one of the shirts had a fake logo of a popular designer and I knew I could not give it to him that way.

I carefully used a sharp blade to trim out the logo and it was very OBVIOUS! One of the shirts was red.

Victor expressed joy over the gifts and the next day he wore one of them to visit me at home. Then he told me that he wore it just to make me happy and that he would never wear it again after that day. For the altered one, he said I should forget it; he wouldn’t even try it on.

He went on to tell me that he loved me and knew I loved him back and how I did not need to spend my money on him to prove my love for him. (Oh how I long for those days..hahahahaha!)

The next Valentine, I bought a white mug with a picture of a red teddy bear and filled it with chocolates, thinking of it now, I must have looked stupid and desperate.

Victor was so happy and my adult mind tells me at this very moment that he felt very sorry for me and probably laughed at me at my back. He does not eat chocolates and could have even given out my gift as to an unsuspecting young girl for Valentine. Lol!

But hey, I wasn’t the only one who acted silly and love struck. Victor once carried a big box of cake all the way from Lagos to Enugu just for me. He came straight to my house from the airport to surprise me at which time the cake was half collapsed.


I felt really special and I believe it was one of his stunts that won me over; he had several…I miss those days for real.

After we got married, we kept on with our Valentine’s day dates even as the children started to come; we would take them with us in car seats to fancy restaurants. Life was w
good indeed.

The Valentine I'll never forget. The day we finally made up our minds that Valentine’s day celebrations were over for us. On that day, we sat in traffic for over four hours trying to get to the restaurant that we had picked for the evening. It rained on that day and it felt like the ghosts of all the souls that St. Valentine fought for came out to play; the traffic was killing.

At some point Victor and I started arguing on whose suggestion we had to leave the house in the first place. We stopped talking to each other at some point till we got home.

Then we tried to get back into the mood  but it was too late; we were just too stressed,. We went to bed hungry and angry.