Maybe it’s love when you’re willing to fight your own demon, just to shield someone from theirs.

There’s a strange kind of courage in that. Not the kind that roars in public or shows up in armor, but the quiet, bleeding bravery of someone who stands between chaos and the person they love. It means knowing you’re broken in places, haunted in corners no one visits yet still choosing to become a shield.

I was once told, that sometimes love isn’t soft. That there are times it doesn’t whisper lullabies. That it doesn’t always feel like comfort or calm.

Sometimes, love looks like sleepless nights, internal battles, gritting your teeth through the echoes of your past just to make sure theirs doesn’t become screams. That their ghosts don’t crawl into bed with them at 2 a.m. And you fight yours in silence, so theirs don’t have to speak.

No one may ever see that war, the one you fight inside your mind, the way you hold your breath when they’re hurting, how you try to become light while darkness is clawing inside you.

But maybe that’s where love truly lives, not in perfection, but in the fight. Not in the flawless days or easy answers, but in the crucible, where pain tests loyalty, where fear burns away illusion, and where choosing each other costs something real. In the quiet, relentless choice to stay. In the bruised hands that keep reaching. In the tired voices that still say, “I’m here.”

It lives in the unspoken vow: “I will face my hell so you don’t have to face yours alone.” Not as a savior, but as a witness. As someone who stays when the fire comes. Because love, in its truest form, is forged in suffering shared, not avoided.

Because if love means anything, it means standing guard at the door of another’s pain, even when you’re bleeding, too.

Love,

ANA 💋