And I a maid at your window to be your Valentine.

I form a rare front: I don't participate in Saint Valentine's day in any traditional sense, nor do I despise it. My blasphemous position, encompassing none of the accepted reactions (love, hate, or loneliness) may be aided by my working in an industry that profits from it. But it isn't the whole of it. Sure, I'll spend the next two days splitting lobsters, shucking oysters, and otherwise fighting the sea in an unremitting fury, and, in two weeks, I'll spend the money tossed to me by terrified men on something bespoke and unnecessary. And I do have a marked fondness for martyrs, especially ones that the church has since declared most probably fictitious. 

But I like the feast because, on this one day of the year, the women who are kind enough to allow us to place things inside of them become gods. The vagina becomes a great beast, a thing that must be appeased with gifts. The ritual is clear: the vagina, for some reason, demands flesh dredged from the ocean floors in great quantities. It orders that all the flowers of the world be plucked and laid at their sheets. (Intensely sexual little brutes, flowers. You can see their bits. They even let you smell them. They hold season-long orgies with bees.) They require chocolate and fine alcohol and jewels dragged from mines by terrified African child-amputees. And, if they are pleased, we, unworthy though we are, are allowed to enter the temple.

Furthermore, allow me to tell you about my favourite customer. I met him only once. He was an older man, unapologetically  gruff. He stomped towards my case years ago on Valentine's day, sized me up, and barked, "I'm cooking for my wife," in such a way that could only mean that he had never, and would never, make such a statement again. He then began a battle. He paced. He stared down my fish. He looked at them and they, though dead for days, felt that surely, in some sea far from where they now lay, had done something horrible to offend this gentleman specifically. After pacing and plotting for ages he looked at me, and in the same rough voice as before demanded, "Where's your prepared foods section?" He didn't even realise he'd been defeated. It was perfection itself. And he's hardly alone: I'll spend the entirety of today drawing diagrams of the dials on ovens for men who, apparently, never wondered what that hole in the wall of their kitchen might be, and never realised that, through twisting knobs, one could cause the inside of it to get quite hot. This is the other reason that I enjoy the holiday: it is entirely and unquestionably heteronormative, and yet contains an inherent role reversal. In order to gain access to women's bits, some men endure women's work, often, it seems to me from my position behind the counter, for the first time all year, or for the first time altogether. And, although I'm sure they'll forget it, I hope they'll realise that women's work is hard.

Is this prostitution? Yes. But I like prostitution. We all deserve to be compensated for our talents from time to time. Enjoy your spoils, ladies.