Valentine's Day Blues
The canvas stared back at me, blank and shouting at me for progress.
I've been standing here for more than twenty minutes, graphite pencil in my hand feeling foreign, waiting for my muse to give me direction. Waiting for that familiar pull that usually drags images and colors from my mind onto the white surface. Waiting for an image to form, the way it always does—images of the metropolis beyond the studio walls, fire trucks rushing to calls, Broadway on opening night.
But today there's nothing.
I set the pencil down and watch idly as it rolls across the paint-splattered table-top, stopping against the white surface of my coffee cup. Logging every detail for later. Because that's what I do. I notice things. The way the light catches the edge of the cup. The particular shade of gray the sky turns before it snows. The architecture of the structures throughout the city as I walk through it each day.
Unfortunately, I can't seem to paint any of it anymore.
With a sigh, I turn and move to the window, crossing my arms and leaning against the window seal. My studio is small, but I've been able to make enough as an artist not just to secure it, but to warrant a long-term lease on the space. A safe space for my creative genius away from my small apartment in uptown. The walls are lined with finished canvases, all of them urban landscapes rendered in carefully planned-out realism. No fantasy. No whimsy. Just the city as it is: beautiful, yet brutal and achingly factual.
That's always been my style. I paint what I see, not what I imagine. My imagination is about as wild as a black and white photo of the desert. Simply put, not imaginative at all. My college professors had called me "grounded" and "technically precise." Gallery owners considered my work "commercially viable." Never "magical" or "transcendent."
I never minded. I've never been the type to believe in fantasies or things beyond the ordinary.
Below, the city moves with the frenzy of the holiday, February 14th—Valentine's Day. Various couples walk through the streets hand in hand through the snow and slush. A man with a bouquet, a woman throwing her head back in laughter at something her partner said. The world around me is paired off today, moving in unison, and here I am—alone with the canvas that refuses to speak to me.
My phone buzzes on the table. I already know what it is before I pick it up and look - the group chat lighting up with 'Happy Valentine's Day' GIFs. Sarah and her husband had a romantic brunch. Michelle and her fiancé were getting ready to go to a show on Broadway together. Even Lisa, perpetually single like me, who swore off men at least twice a year, had a Valentine's date tonight.
I turn the phone face-down without responding to any of them. I'll send congratulations and emojis later on as the supportive good friend I should be. But right now, in the gray light of my lonely sanctuary with my dying fern, blank canvas and the distant sound of New York City, I just...can't.
It's not that I begrudge them their happiness. I don't. I'm genuinely glad that the people I care about have found the people who love them. These are my people, my closest friends and confidants. Ever since freshman orientation, when we had all ended up on the same floor of the same dorm and bonded over bad cafeteria food and shared anxieties over our future.
I've watched them fall in love and get their hearts broken, picked them up when they needed me to. I was there when Sarah cried for three days after her college boyfriend cheated on her. I was there when Michelle got rejected from every graduate program she applied to. I was there when Lisa's mother got sick, and she flew home to Chicago for two months, coming back hollow and empty after her death. Somewhere along the way, I'd simply stopped believing in love, or that, that kind of thing was meant for me. Not in a dramatic, or even tragic way — just the quiet acceptance that comes from failed relationships. Some people are meant for fairy tales. Others aren't.
It's not that I haven't tried. Three relationships, each one ending the same way: with the other person deciding I was 'too hard' to love, too distant, too guarded, too lost in my own head to really let anyone else in.
Daniel said I was easier to admire than to know. That loving me was like looking at one of my paintings — beautiful to look at, impossible to touch.
Mark said I held myself apart even when we were intimate. That he never knew what I was thinking, and after a while, the glamor of wanting to know had worn off.
James didn't say anything at all. He just stopped calling, stopped texting, stopped showing up all together.
I've made my peace with being on the outside looking in. Or at least, I thought I had. But the holiday had brought out a longing in me that I hadn't known I still possessed. A loneliness that usually felt like solitude, comfortable, chosen, feeling far heavier. And worse, it's seeped into my work. Into the blank canvas that mocks me from its easel.
I can't paint because I'm numb, unfeeling. Or perhaps, raw and feeling all too much that I don't care to admit.
"Okay," I say aloud, to no one. "That's enough. Let's take a walk."
Moping in the studio isn't going to fix the problem. If inspiration won't come to me here, maybe I need to go looking for it. That's what the professors used to tell us as students: when your stuck, move. Change your perspective. Look at something you've seen a thousand times and try to see it with new eyes.
I grab my beanie and pull it on before pulling on my coat — a worn wool peacoat that's seen better days but is almost a second skin -grabbing my sketchbook and pocketing a few pencils to accompany it. The sketchbook is small, a pocket-sized one that I carry everywhere just in case something inspires me. But it's been weeks since I've drawn anything in it at all.
When I step outside, the cold bites at my exposed skin for the first few minutes, until my skin is as numb as my heart. February in New York is no joke — it's the kind of cold that seeps into your bones and makes you question why you chose New York instead of Los Angeles. But there's beauty in the cold, if you know where to look. The way the fog settles in the air, illuminating the night lights of the city. The crystalline qualities of fresh white snow glimmering in the afternoon sunshine.
Turning the corner, I head for the nearest subway station, joining the stream of humanity flowing through the tunnel. Of course, today the trains are full of couples and people carrying flowers and gifts in various shades of red, pink and white. Slipping through the sliding doors onto the train, I find a seat near the door and watch the faces all around me, cataloging details out of habit. The tired set of a mother's shoulders. The nervous energy of a young man clutching a small jewelry box. The steady indifference of a woman my age, tucked away against the window, alone, reading a book with a cover she's hidden behind her bag.
I wonder if she's hiding a romance novel, maybe even one of those popular dark romance ones with the morally gray anti-hero as the love interest. Lisa loves those ones.
Jumping off the at the Central West Park and West 77th st. station, I climb the stairs and head out into the white-blanketed grounds of Central Park. Bare trees reaching toward the gray sky like hands grasping for something just out of reach. This is my place of refuge when the studio doesn't speak to me — ever since I moved to the city eight years ago. I've walked every path, sketched every bridge, painted the same lakes in every season.
I step through the entrance and let the park swallow me whole.
