Anatomy of Love | The Many Faces of Love: Part II

Notes from the Hollow Bone, entry seventeen

The Cost of Wonder

Love does not always arrive with ease.
It is not always soft or warm.
Sometimes it calls you out into the night—
away from comfort,
away from safety,
into the bite of small hungers
that take what they will.

And yet—
above, the sky waits.
A cathedral of dark,
a blanket of stars spread wide,
the kind of beauty that humbles
and consumes in the same breath.

Here is the paradox:
every face of love carries a cost.
Sometimes the cost is heartbreak.
Sometimes it is longing.
Sometimes it is simply the stinging of the night
against your skin,
a reminder that wonder is never free.

But you pay it.
Because to lift your eyes,
to be broken open by vastness,
to let yourself be undone—
this is the holy toll of love.

For love is not only found in fire,
nor in the ache of absence.
It is also in the sacrifice
of standing still,
of bearing the small wounds
that beauty requires.

And in this surrender,
you remember what it means
to be remade by wonder.

With Grace & Ink,
~Mai