the beautiful mess of love

love is not a clean thing. it is not polite or predictable or poised—it is not soft petals in a vase on a sunlit table with matching chairs and tidy smiles. no, love is much wilder than that. love is undone hair and trembling hands and loud hearts that beat out of sync until, somehow, they don’t. love is messy—god, it is messy. it is crying in parking lots and laughing too hard at the wrong times. it is miscommunication, hurt feelings, and finding the courage to say, “i’m sorry,” and mean it. it is learning the language of another soul and sometimes getting it wrong. it’s burning dinner and still sitting down together to eat. it’s unmade beds, forgotten socks, half-said sentences, and all the moments in between that hold you closer than any vow ever could.

because love—real love—is not for the faint of heart. it is not always beautiful in the way movies show it, but it is always beautiful in the way it matters. love looks like compromise, like starting over, like doing the hard thing even when every bone in your body is tired. it’s holding space for the versions of your person that are still healing, still learning, still blooming. it’s choosing them in the middle of their chaos and letting them choose you in yours. love is planting roots in shaky soil and learning to grow anyway. it is trusting that even in the wreckage, even in the ache, even in the impossible—the thread between your hearts will hold. and that? that is the kind of magic that cannot be replicated or rewritten. it is holy in its imperfection.

the mess of it—the spilled coffee, the raised voices, the nights apart, the aching—that’s where the beauty lives. because if you can love someone when the light flickers, when their worst parts rise to the surface, when life is heavy and nothing feels fair—then you have tasted something rare. something divine. something true. love is not the absence of pain, it is the refusal to let go in the midst of it. it is a hand reaching across the bed after a hard day. it is saying, “i still want you,” with tired eyes. it is staying. not because you have to. but because you want to.

and that, darling, is love in its most honest form—
not clean, not easy, not perfect—
but real. and whole. and worth every beautifully tangled second.

with ink + bloom, 🌻