Worst Valentine’s Day!

Posted by Nick Martinez in Students

Photo by Kyleigh Carter

In honor of Valentine’s Day, Jackalope Magazine staff looks back at each of their worst day of love.

Charlotte Martinez

I liked the idea that I could dodge the popularity contest on Valentine’s Day and be the deliverer of the half-inflated, cheap-candy balloon grams at our high school instead. This “In-the-spirit-of-the-Holiday” activity wasn’t my idea, but the rest of the committee thought it was cute. But it was high school and it was not cute. I skipped two classes that morning in exchange for contemptuous glares from teachers, who I thought might enjoy surprise deliveries for their students (maybe they were getting crushed on or perhaps dumped if the committee missed the “f*** you” on the tag). The teachers looked at me as if the pink balloons, candy wrappers, and drama-induced tears of that day were my fault. Somehow, after that, I became less popular.

Serefima Fedorova

Photo by Kyleigh Carter

I once tried to make handmade Valentine’s Day cards for everyone and overestimated my abilities. It was 4 a.m., I was sitting with 15 colorful testaments to undying friendship, and by then I had damned glitter and quirky prose to hell.

Zoe Baillargeon

Picture this. Middle school. You’re already awkward, so a date is definitely off the menu. You’re fine with that, there’s still chocolate, you just have to get through a day of high school couples confessing their undying love. But wait, there’s more! You go into class and guess what? It’s sex education day. You proceed to roll gelled condoms onto bananas, get an eyeful of how STDs will CAN and WILL destroy your ‘secret garden’, and examine a wooden phallus appropriately named ‘Mr. Woody.’ Finish that uncomfortable ring of hell and level up to your biology class where, joy of joys, today you will be viewing ‘The Miracle of Life.’ Watch a baby get graphically ejected from a small and bloody orifice and decide that love and sex is DEFINITELY for someone else. You’ll become a hermit instead. Or a nun.

Nick Beckman

The day was February 14, 1943. The Germans had painted the fucking dirt with Allied blood. The dead stacked higher than the unrelenting bombers. I prayed, even though I knew God had left Tunisia the same way the Germans came in: de Faid-pass.

Photo by Kyleigh Carter

Nick Martinez

Valentine’s is one of the most romantic holidays of the year, short of Flag Day and Thanksgiving. It’s the time to show the one you love how you really feel, because the other 362 are time to hide your feelings, and be emotionally neglectful. So, on this most magical day, other than the other two, my 7^th grade class made a field trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.

Charlotte Renken

We’d been dating for several months and went out for sushi, which I hated at the time. A week before that I bought $80 worth of lingerie. I wore these layers under my dress during the dinner and put on a “show” back at his place. He didn’t get me a single thing.

Ash Haywood

One lonely Valentine’s Day I was playing extreme frisbee barefoot with a group of Frenchmen that I did not know in a park in Brooklyn. Then I stepped on a dead bee, stinging myself with a dead bee for the second time in my life. The pain shot up my leg, turning my face beet red. I crawled to my shoes without saying a word and hobbled off to my apartment to cry alone.

Ashley Costello

Valentine’s Day 2006, my long-term boyfriend (now my ex) and I had a beautiful picnic in the afternoon at Cochiti Lake. We decided to stay in that night, cuddled up, and watch Grey’s Anatomy. Being broke, we decided to buy some food from Wal-Mart to make a something of a ‘romantic dinner’ for ourselves. Around midnight we decided to move things to the bedroom, however, we both started feeling ill simultaneously and for the next several hours shared the toilet, vomiting in intervals, this lasted the next three days and one hospital trip later, we had both suffered from acute food poisoning.