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     I watched When Harry Met Sally in full for the first time this February. As much as I want to talk every little thing I loved about that movie — Billy Crystal crushing one-liners that would seem lazy from anyone else’s lips, Meg Ryan emoting more with her face than most could manage for a full performance — to me, February felt less like the month of love and more like a month of mystery.

 

     I’m an introverted extrovert, but when cold, rainy weather combined with a weighty workload, I became a full recluse.  I only started to figure out why in the first week of March, with the help of the world’s greatest detective, The Batman.  Something about Robert Pattinson’s performance as the caped crusader — a skinny man with shaggy hair, soundtracked by Nirvana in the rare moments he leaves his room — struck a chord in me.  In writing this, I solved my own mystery. 

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     February 14th was Valentine’s Day, and I marked it as such twice on my Google Calendar.  A foreboding fear had hung over me for the first weeks of the month: a fear that I would forget to buy my girlfriend a gift.  I didn’t, and never have in our past four years, so the fear felt unfounded.  It crept out in moments of high stress — as I was washing the dishes while thinking about what time to go to bed and wondering how an unholy cacophony of three separate songs got stuck in my head — my heart would drop.  Each time I tried to put my finger to the pulse, all I could hear was my heartbeat.  Romantic, right?  

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     If not already obnoxiously apparent in my writing, I have attention deficit disorder, and this month, Walgreens ran out of Adderall.  I figured this out when I ran inside said Walgreens on Valentine’s afternoon to pick up a Notes app list of four items: Ferrero Rocher, a bright red gift bag, and my prescriptions of Celexa and Adderall.  I left with three of the four, before booking it to Barnes and Noble to buy a complete Lord of the Rings compilation to fill the bright red bag.  

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     That evening, everything went swell; we exchanged gifts and we watched The Grand Budapest Hotel.  She loved the book and has read a shocking amount of it already.  My creeping fear was indeed unfounded, and I cracked the case a few weeks later, after I took the Enneagram Test.  I’m a Type 3, the Achiever, who went unmedicated for most of the month of love.  My girlfriend’s gift to me was a couple’s pedicure appointment that finally moved me out of my mental pit and into the first moment of peace I’d had all February.  It’s people that make your heart beat that help you remember to breathe as well.