Perhaps repetition and romance can’t co-exist. Every Valentine’s Day, your father picks up his old acoustic guitar and, over a bottle wine, he sings the same old love songs that he always sings to your mother. You enjoy the tradition, however, the songs have always seemed like other people’s words taken from dead love affairs. Your mother is often more interested in the wine than the wooing.

You don’t know where the songs came from or why he always feels the need to sing the same ones. There’s something familiar about each, though, you’ve never heard him play them in his car or on the radio.

Today each song seems warmer that they have in the past. You see, you aren’t thinking about your dad and mom at all when you hear them. Instead you are thinking about this morning. You’d watched out your classroom window for the French girl and her mother. The world opened up like a flower bud in the sun when they turned the corner.

Then disaster. After her mom finished tying the blue ribbon and had turned away, the French girl untied it and removed it from her hair. You slumped into your seat. The entire morning bent at the top of the stem. The removal of the blue ribbon was a hailstone in your heart. You’d ruined something delicate and beautiful. And while you knew from the beginning that it couldn’t always be, you didn’t want to ever find out you were right.

That afternoon, when you were saddest and most anxious, waiting in art class, she reappeared beside her desk with the ribbon retied around her neck.

Tonight dad’s songs seem more about today’s afternoon than someone else’s afternoon years ago.