You know its bad when your Valentine's day starts with your ideas of love and matrimony being completely shattered. Usually as a kid, I would wake up on Valentine's day to some heart shaped pancakes or something. I woke up this day (around twelve years old) to my older sister crying and screaming "Mom's going to kill Dad!" I'd heard it before, but she seemed serious this time. I could hear some loud clanging noises downstairs, too, like robots kickboxing. Downstairs, Dad sat blankly in the corner of the kitchen as Mom dug through his numerous tool-boxes, dropping wrenches/spanners/screwdrivers on our kitchen floor. Oddly enough, he did nothing to stop her. It probably had something to do with the handgun on her hip. Living in Alaska, we usually used the gun to scare off grizzlies. Fire it once into the air and it'll spook the biggest fucking bear in the world. Point it at my father's head and he'll instantly regret flirting with the girl at the town dump. He could usually wink and Paul Newman his way to $5 off our trash charge, but this time he'd smirked his way to a very inappropriate and poorly-timed Valentine's day "card" from this poor girl, the town slut, who'd go after any friendly railroad worker with a mustache. Mom had freaked out before, but the silent rage with which she scoured my father's belonging for other signs of affairs seemed different this time. Maybe it was the audacity of the card, or note, or whatever you can call a list of instructions that can only be carried out on a bed with at least a 16-inch tall headboard. I hadn't seen the note of course, but I learned of it's nature years later when my Mom tried to justify sleeping with and being impregnated by the local elementary school principle. The principle never resigned and my parents never broke up, never even spent the night away from each other. Basically retired vampires now, they spend all day in bed with various members of the community, then go home at sundown to stare vapidly at each other from across the living room all night. They have their principals, I suppose. Never go to bed angry. Never go to bed at all.

Anyway, back to my terrible Valentine's day. On the way to school, my distracted sister hit a baby moose on our iced-over dirt road. These things happen when you live in the middle of fucking nowhere and the snow gets too deep for the animals to walk in the woods. Sometimes, driving home, you'll end up herding 3 or 4 different woodland creatures into your driveway. Today however, we ran into this moose, a sad, gangly little creature and watched it die while its mother walked away. Moose know when to give up on loved ones, apparently. We were both crying at this point. I remember this one moment so clearly because it was the most connected I have ever felt with my sister. We grew as almost distant acquaintances, car-poolers stuck together by location. When we weren't driving to or from school, she was off getting stoned with Steven, our town's one gay guy on top of an abandoned satellite dish and I was building what I thought were pretty accurate versions of my cousin's tits out of Legos. This Valentine's though, in the pitch-black 20-below morning, with a bleeding, twitching moose in front of us, we sat and smoked a cigarette together. My sister had smoked for years, at least since she was 14, but probably long before that. She wanted to be Kurt Vonnegut. She also wanted to be Kurt Cobain. I however, wanted to be the complete opposite of her. I played basketball, ran, and led the elementary school Student Activities committee. I took the cigarette that morning though, and skipping school, we hung out in the town park and I took about 10 more from her. Ever since I have used nicotine to cope on days when life just seems too difficult (Read: 20 times a day, every day of my life.)

My smoking habit was all I picked up that day, luckily. My parent's tumultuous and aggressive way of dealing with each other never caught on, and I've had plenty of happy Valentine’s days since, sitting alone, rolling cigarettes and cursing the last girl to ditch me for someone else. Just know... I would never, ever point a gun at her.