Being single for more than 25 years gives me, I think, credentials to talk about Valentine’s Day in terms of self-love.

Whether I’m writing a poem about romantic possibilities:

We could be celestial
as the choir I heard in San Gimignano
the highest pure note from a boy.
You are a room full of light.
When I walk in, I want to pray.

Or remembering a marriage that worked for a while:

Nobody’s key fits my lock the way yours does, baby.
Nobody’s key sounds so welcome late at night.
Nobody kisses like the end of the world, baby.
Nobody unlocks me the way you do.

My go-to when February 14 rolls around is to relive the scenario in my slam poem, “If You Want Something Done Right.”  Here are a few lines:

. . . As a girl, I made a fold of silky panties
and finding the pleasure spot, ruffled it
until the blood swelled into a pebble of sensation.
As a woman, I learned to touch  bare flesh,
the wet of it, the hair or shaved of it,
the deep rose pink of it. . .

But self-love is not merely a physical act, it’s an attitude of being.

It’s what inspired me to gift myself a gold band with a tiny diamond, along  with a bouquet of yellow roses, eight years post-divorce. I spent that Valentine’s evening before my fireplace writing down and burning every thought of being unlucky or unworthy of love.

It’s what makes me say to my body when it hurts, “What are you trying to tell me with this pain?” It’s what I say when I stop paying attention and have to bring myself back to awareness: “I love you Jennie. I love you Jennie” over and over.

Today I researched how to broil a lobster tail with garlic butter and served it to myself as a pre-Valentine’s Day lunch, lemon wedge on the side. (I’m grateful I have a lunch to eat, as hundreds of thousands of my fellow humans do not.)

I urge you, whether you have a current sweetheart or none, and with whatever level of passion your life contains, to remember every person or pet who has ever loved you, and all whom you have loved. These interactions have helped create the complexity of you. And that person you are, however imperfect, is loveable. Right now, look in the mirror and say so.