YANA

Love is the only thing that ever made the universe feel small enough to fit inside a chest.
Not the grand, movie-poster version with slow-motion rain and perfect lighting.
Not even the quiet Hallmark one with matching sweaters and hot cocoa.
The real one.
The stupid, inconvenient, sometimes ugly one.
The kind that makes you stay after midnight even though you have an 8 a.m.
The kind that makes you text “did you eat?” at 2:37 a.m. like it’s a national emergency
The kind that survives “I don’t know if I can do this anymore”
and still shows up the next morning with coffee and terrible bed hair.
Love is less lightning strike
and more slow forest fire that learned patience.
It burns through pride,
through the armor we spent decades welding shut,
through the very sensible reasons we made for never letting anyone that close again.
And when everything is ash
it doesn’t promise a phoenix.
It just quietly starts growing new green things
in the places we swore would stay dead forever.
Most days love doesn’t feel poetic.
It feels like choosing someone’s bad morning mood over a peaceful solitude,
like arguing about dishwasher placement at 11 p.m.,
like noticing they always leave the last bite of dessert for you
even when they really wanted it.
And somehow—god knows how—
that tiny, ridiculous, stubborn collection of moments
becomes the only proof we have
that something in this chaotic, temporary, heartbreaking existence
is actually worth keeping.
So here’s to the unphotogenic love,
the one with stretch marks and inside jokes nobody else gets,
the one that forgets anniversaries but remembers how you take your painkillers,
the one that stays.
Because in the end
maybe that’s the whole quiet miracle of it:
Love doesn’t always save us.
But it very often chooses to sit with us in the dark
until we’re ready to try standing again.
And that,
my god,
is already more than enough.