These are the tiny memories that unravel me, the ones I don’t see coming. I miss her. And suddenly my eyes start tearing up and I am grabbing fistfuls of tissue, tilting my head back. I think of all these years she’s been gone that I’ve spent dating all the wrong men, trying to make it to the next holiday or birthday with them before breaking it off, a kind of madness. But never Valentine’s Day–on which I prefer to be single, to remember the feeling of being loved unconditionally by someone truly special, as was my mother.