By Daisy Archer
14th February 2026
Dear Thomas,
It’s the day of the lovers, and I know you’re aware of it. Whether it’s a day for loud lovers or private lovers, it’s a day for lovers all the same.
The gift aisle in the supermarket didn’t underestimate this fact— pink hearts, bright colours. Cards with phrases full of both adoration and of lust. Chocolates in heart shaped boxes, the kind a person could buy any time of year; a tactful expression of marketing. Small things a person probably doesn’t need, but accepts, in the name of Saint Valentine. I’ve seen many examples of silent, private and loud loving, yet I have come to very few conclusions about which kind equals success.
I’ll admit that at first, I picked up a Valentine’s day card. I traced it with my fingers like an archaeologist might trace a missing artifact, gloves on, but with feeling. Two sheep were printed side-by-side on the surface. Love Ewe was written underneath. The sheep were the picture of contentment— taken with one another, in the human sense. Why is it that we claim love as a delicate human emotion, but when we imagine it, we imagine it in the forms of animals? Creatures like sheep are somewhat inaudible to us.
They speak but we can’t understand their words. When domesticated, they follow orders. Creatures of simplicity. From our keen human eyes, their behaviour seems to play out as a consistent habit of adoration, but it’s possible that what we are seeing when we glance into a field may not be that. It may not be love but something else entirely. Thick hugging wool, pointed ears, shaven, unshaven, horns, no horns. One colour, another colour. Loyal creatures driven by instinct, as most of us tend to be. Social creatures that protect their own. It is these traits that design the idyllic human partner. A figure without the challenges, without the mistakes underwritten in humanity. Because humans love in human ways. Buying cards, chocolate and roses. But that love is branded in animalistic ways. A card decorated with thick woolled sheep, a promise of simpleness, of loyalty. Perhaps there is hope to be found in those traits. Solace.
In the supermarket, there’s a customer announcement about a closing checkout. The overhead lights are cool-toned but far too bright. My head spun from the intensity of the lighting and the interrupting voice on the loudspeaker. It spun the same way it tends to when I wear headphones for too long. I stare at the card again. Perhaps I’m overthinking it and the card’s allure is only that sheep are endearing, and a recipient would stifle a giggle at the pun.
I once discovered this fuzzy kind of love in my grandparents’ relationship. Distance between them was an atypical happening. In every glimpse of them that I captured, they stood together— often at arms' length or sometimes just in eyeline. Cooking in the same kitchen or coffee drinking in the conservatory, watching the birds nestling in the enormous oak of the garden. Usually her hand sat in his, whether they were directly next to each other or reaching across the coffee table. Their skin was always in contact. In style, the two were somewhat eccentric and took little note of societal expectations, nor the stares they received. In fact, they seemed to take little notice of the world outside of each other. As a woman growing into her sexuality, I didn’t quite know how to take this. A romantic tale of consumption, an over-consumption of feeling, of expression, as exterior life simmered in the background. Or just a rejection — a rejection of post-modernity, template lifestyles the media convinces a person to want— or believe they want. To me, my grandparents’ love was a different kind of love. You never met my grandparents, Thomas. What’s sad is that I think there’s no true way to understand me without understanding them; without watching everything they put into each other, each morsel and unit of possibly-summoned love. Naturally I’ve always been discouraged about love and being bound by its various contracts with the heart—especially when affronted by supermarket Valentine’s Day cards. What irked me was the obvious fact they had been recently replenished before my arrival. Reduced stickers sat upon their plastic coats, despite it being only Valentines’ morning and not the latter. I found sorrow in the cards’ appearance. Unclaimed and unloved. On sale for any guilt-ridden fuck-I-forgot buyers or buyers determined to pick one up on the way home. I felt for the cards. To never feel the press of a pen or ink. To never read the lines of love that they were created to internalise.
Where's the love in that?
And I dare mention the greater subject at hand: if a person rescues a card from being disposed of, from going to landfill, is it this act of rescuing where love can be found? Grandmother once predicted that cards, and with that, writing, would go out of style— she received fewer birthday cards every year. Though not from lack of friendships and subsequent effort.
But of course, the true love reflected in Valentine’s Day cards shouldn’t become a pollutant; it should sit merrily on a bedside table or a mantelpiece, or maybe enclosed within a treasured box under the recipient’s bed.
Love was littered over my grandparents’ house. Enveloped in every corner of it.
I remember their house, too. I remember it as well as I can remember what I ate for breakfast there each morning. It gets a little harder to remember everyday, but because it was always the same, the memory is fixed. I ate porridge with sugar every morning and every day that I visited, the house remained the same. Their house was very different to ours, Thomas. I’m almost grateful you never got to see it. The living-room carpet was an unpleasant red. The shade of red that made potential buyers screw their noses up and offer less than the asking price. There was a small bar in the room’s corner, built from stone fragments. A small bar my brother and I would use for hide and seek as children. We would crouch behind the bar, waiting for grandma to discover us. She pretended not to know where we were, even though we picked the same hiding spot every time. I often sneezed from the accumulated dust and gave away our position, which felt like a tragedy at the time.
What is it, Thomas, to be loved and selfishly so, when ignoring the fact the world is dying and the climate is changing. Builders are building more houses, one brick at a time yet it’ll never be enough to house the UK and everyone in it. Our love often only extends to humankind, but not all of humankind.
I used to buy all of these things for you, the human items laid out in the supermarket. Cards, chocolate, presents. Love letters and handwritten notes, over-apologising and trying to be better. Gifts wrapped with heart-shaped paper and ribbon, expressing how much I loved you and how much I loved that you loved me too.
You told me that I changed, but did I really? You told me it started with my hair, my clothes. My hobbies, my friends. My outlook on life and what I want it to be. You told me that I wasn’t the same woman you married. Not the same girl you loved, cherished, had and held. Perhaps the romantics believed that love is so special because it’s so easy to lose.
I put down the card, and cast away the loyal eyes of the sheep. The card felt wrong in my hand, as if it were attempting to reclaim a history so previous and detached. Each card sat idly on the shelf, their colours going unnoticed to my eyes. How could I pick one up? With us, I no longer know if there's platonic love left to be found. What would I write inside?
I hope you had a good day at work. Hope the landlord is nicer to our bank account this year. You spend a lot of time doing yoga and a lot of time talking about it. And the yoga teacher in pink leggings is oh so fascinated by the way you perform a child’s pose. I found your keys on the coffee table. They weren’t on the mantelpiece like they were supposed to be.
Maybe I’d say that, or write about the weather, or what a politician said on the news. Or I’d simply say Happy Valentine’s Day. We both know it’s over.
With a kind of love— the nostalgic kind,
Violet