Let’s have a heart to heart. It’ll be quick. I don’t think I’m supposed to have it outside my body for too long. Welcome to Night Vale.

We tried to prevent it. We tried to avoid it. We tried to deny it, to pretend that if we did nothing maybe it would pass us by. But unfortunately, for the first time in five years, Valentine’s Day has happened again. I know that all of us survivors must be rattled, barely hanging on, gaping up at the sun and disbelieving the light. But know that you are not alone. We are all survivors, and Valentine’s Day is behind us. What choice have we but to try to put our world back together, to move on from here? What choice have we but the continuance of time? Time, which is simultaneously merciful and without mercy, driving the bad toward us, but also sweeping it safely away into the past.

Valentines Day is over. Now the recovery begins.

But first, the news.

The sun has risen. This might not seem like news to you. Oh, it does that every day, you tell me. It will do it tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, you pedantically lecture. But think about what a miracle that is. That this cosmic object without which there is no life, without which there is merely barren rock floating in a great nothing, that the sun returns to us, day after day, like a dependable mother coming home from work.

In the journalism business, there is a lot of focus on the negative and the rare. Take for instance airplanes. We report on even the most minor of mishaps that occur in commercial flight, but do not report on the thousands of successful take offs and landings every day. The common success is not news, the vanishingly rare failure is. As a result, you might get the impression that flying is not safe, but that’s an incomplete picture. The truth is that everything is not safe. Flying is just part of everything.

Same with the sun. We don’t report on its successful rising and setting, and so you think it common, or often don’t think of it at all.

Ah but here you are, a journalist, reporting on something common and positive, you say, really testing the limits of my patience.

Because you have not let me finish. The sun has risen today. But it will not tomorrow. You think a plane crash is bad? Just wait.

This has been local news.

In international news, wars, probably. Usually, right? Also trade. Trade is very important, because that is how number go up. If number not go up, mm. Then you got wars.

There are also trees, of course, internationally, and nationally. But less of them than before. We like trees. This is not for the trees’ sake. It’s because it turns out we need trees, and so we like them. Before, eh, could take or leave.

Internationally speaking, thinking on a global level now, really thinking big, there is politics. Politics is the art of the possible. Sorry, misread. Politics is the art of explaining why nothing is possible, even though almost everything is. Seems like a real messed up slogan to me, but what do I know? I’m not a politician.

The important thing is to think globally but act locally. So think about, for instance, Antarctica. Cold, right? Brr. But act locally. Locally it’s pretty warm. Hot even. It’s a desert. So go for a swim in your friend Lupita’s pool. While thinking about Antarctica. And that’s how we’ll really make a change.

This has been international news.

From my window, I see only destruction.

Oh, and Leann Hart, who is waving at me and mouthing a big hi. Hi Leann. I like your hatchet today. Yes, it matches your shoes. Very cute.

But other than Leann, I see only destruction.

A teetering, a crumbling. The hollow remnant of, the last remaining brick of, the empty field where once there was. This destruction exists in our hearts as well. Every loss in the physical world is reflected ten times in the memory of everyone who bore witness to Valentine’s Day. And there has been so much loss.

We are each of us a hall of mirrors, exponentializing every little hurt until it overwhelms.

Today is the day after the day. The Hallmark store is an absolute wreck. The Hallmark elves are trying to sweep it all up, but they look exhausted and some of them mangled by what happened.

More soon, but now, traffic.

Once there was a town. It doesn’t matter which town, except to those who lived there, for whom it mattered quite a lot. The town had roads and houses and three schools and two Wendys. The two Wendys were both on the same side of the town. No one knew why.

The point is that this town wasn’t a special town, it was just a town, which is to say a bunch of people, most of whom didn’t know each other, living in a space that had been defined by people who had long since died. And yet, the people in this town, they felt something about their town. It wasn’t pride, exactly. But it wasn’t an absence of pride, either. More like a sense of belonging. The town was them and they were the town. And it was arbitrary but it was theirs. And so it mattered to them, because in the grand scale, not much belonged to them. A bit of grass, or gravel. A few walls. A sink or two. And the idea of this town. So they felt protective of what they had.

Eventually the town ended. All towns eventually will. It was not dramatic when it ended, no one even had to move. The town was swallowed by a larger city. Now it was just one neighborhood in a city with eighteen schools and five Wendys. Although the Wendys were all still very close together. No one knew why.

The people who lived in that town felt some loss at the change, but their children didn’t, and their children’s children had no idea that the town had existed. For them, they belonged to the city, and the city belonged to them. It was arbitrary, but it was theirs. And so it mattered to them.

This has been traffic.

And now, our daily audio puzzle.

As usual, you have six attempts to guess a five letter word. I’ll tell you what letters aren’t in it. There is no B, V, D, A, E, I, F, C, ellipses, or umlauts. To the disappointment of your insufferable writer friends, there is no em dash. None of the wing-ding characters are there, nor any of the ancient Nordic runes. There is the Egyptian hieroglyph that’s a detailed portrait of a pintailed duck. It is in position five, so think about words that end with a little duck picture. There is no O. There is a U, but it’s not in the word, it’s just nearby. The sixth letter is Y, but it is both silent and invisible. As a hint, the meaning of the word is “grandly but foolishly, as in the style of a 16th century jester.” Ok, you have six guesses. Good luck!

This has been your daily audio puzzle.

The City Council has declared a state of emergency from a beach resort in Bermuda, which is where it says they should go in the Night Vale emergency plans. “See,” they shrieked, “it’s written right here. In the event of a catastrophe, the City Council must immediately go to a really nice, like at least four star, resort in Bermuda.” I pointed out that they were the ones who wrote those plans, but I was shouted down by their many voices.

The only Council member that stayed was of course the intrepid Tamika Flynn, who managed the blood donation program for the injured. She did this by repeatedly stabbing vicious Librarians with a harpoon while they tried to wrap their tendrils and toothy jaws around her, then collecting that blood and handing it out in little zip loc bags marked “Fresh Blood!” with a smiley face. She really is so considerate.

Fortunately, it appears that Carlos and Esteban were totally safe from Valentines. Carlos is more of a St Patrick’s Day guy, and Esteban is, you know, a 4 year old.

As for me, I did what every Night Vale citizen is taught to do in the event of a Valentines Day. I ducked and covered, held on tight to the nearest table leg, and screamed “oh no oh help oh please” over and over until it seemed like things had settled down.

And now a word from our sponsors.

Today’s broadcast is brought to you. It was given. You did nothing to receive it, and yet here it is. Do you ever think about what was required for this broadcast to reach you? Not just my hard work, nor the work of my producers, nor of station management, whatever it is they do inside the caverns they’ve dug beneath their office, nor of the interns who sacrifice time and…other things to the cause of your momentary diversion. No, it is also the labor of the steel workers who made the girders for our tower, the engineers and day workers who constructed it, the electricians who made it sing with radio waves. All of these people brought this broadcast to you. Do you feel grateful? Do you often feel grateful?

Today’s broadcast is brought to you. Think on that.

This has been a word from our sponsors.

Wreckage upon wreckage. We walk through a street strewn with boxes of chocolates and red crepe and shattered buildings, asphalt buckled under the seismic expression of yearning hearts. Each of us has been affected in our own way.

Jackie Fierro says that her pawn shop has been inundated with teddy bears, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to sell enough of them to find the structure of her shop again. “It’s buried under a good four miles of them,” she sighed, leaning back on the hood of her 2007 Ford F150.

Sarah Sultan, president of the Night Vale Community College, who is a fist sized river rock, says that she suffered severe injuries during the disaster and cannot heal, because she is a fist sized river rock, and so has no healing capabilities.

My niece Janice said that the Registry of Middle School Crushes (which she keeps on her desk, no longer afraid of its secrets but enjoying it as a memento of adventures past,) anyway she said that the Registry burst into flames, and she only prevented my sister’s house from burning as well by grabbing the Registry with her bare hands and hurling it out the window. In the process her hands were burnt quite badly, and she is being attended to at Night Vale hospital. They tell me she should make a full recovery soon. Also, she accidentally threw the Registry out of her window and right into the neighbor’s window, burning down their house. Ah well. Pobody’s nerfect.

What are we to do, the day after the day? What else is there, but to exist, and to observe the weather?

[Weather: “I Went Swimming to the Middle of the Sea” by Raising Cain https://raising-cain.bandcamp.com/]

The day after Valentines we woke like it was any other day, but it was not any other day. The day after Valentines we looked hard at everything around us, because it should have been different. But it was not different. We were different.

The day after Valentines, I went to the Ralphs and bought four oranges and a box of cereal. Just that. Just four oranges. Just a box of cereal. And it felt the same but it felt so different, and I struggled to put into words my own experience. There is a gulf shaped by trauma that is invisible even to the sufferer. We do not see the crevasse even as we fall into it.

The day after Valentines, I ate a picnic in Grove Park with Carlos and Esteban and Dana Cardinal and Pamela Winchell. Carlos ate little. Said he wasn’t hungry. Dana ate her fill, but said it didn’t taste like much. Everything seems a little duller today, she said. Not quite itself. But everything was the same. It was Dana that was different. Pamela Winchell expounded for several minutes on the meaning of emergency. It was a coping mechanism, and it comforted her. Esteban rolled around in the grass and giggled. Any lasting effects from Valentine’s Day were buried in him, and would only surface later as a tremble or a habit that he would not understand.

The day after Valentine’s we said “it’s over” but we did not believe it was over. We believed it would never be over, that we would always be living the same sad and terrifying minute, breathing the same stale air thick with our own fear. But we were not in that moment anymore. But we were, some part of us, still.

The day after Valentine’s was a rebuilding, a recovery, a return to form, a back to business. Bury the bodies and stand up the fences, it’s time to move on.

We relentlessly devour the past and regurgitate it as the future. We are always caught in a moment that is no longer what was but is not quite yet what will be. We live our entire lives in between. In between joys. In between tragedies. In between picnics with friends.

And so the day after Valentine’s, we did what we did any day. We made do. We moved on. We continued to live, until we couldn’t anymore.

Stay tuned next for an old episode of Frasier. It’s the one where Frasier finds the doorway to the Other Seattle in his bathroom mirror. May it bring you some comfort.

And from the day after Valentine’s to whatever day it is when you hear this.

Good night, Night Vale. Good night.