#love is complex

[mymidwestheart]

You do love a disservice when you oversimplify it.

[birdmanhowl]

I'm convinced that people who say billy abused max have never had a sibling.

[dissonantdreamer]

You ever just, months after the game, wanna cry thinking about everything and hoping against all odds that Ellie and dina end up okay

It takes them some time as love always does. They heal separately for a while. After all, how can you put your pieces back together when they broke even more while you were apart? It's not easy, Dina has trust issues, for a while, leaving feels like a goodbye every time they part. They talk now, really talk. Build up and break down in each others arms. It's like when she's working on a radio these days, you have to test the parts, bend metal, re-wire, find the dead parts and replace them. Eventually, the radio gets puzzled out and when she hears a voice on the other end for the first time it feels rewarding beyond words.

Ellie stays.

Ellie opens up and doesn't stop, she tells the nurse stitching her wounds together she's here to stay. She tells Maria everything that happened in Santa Barbara, asks for help to move on. She tells Tommy that it's over they can't kill what's left of Joel, what's left of themselves. She tells Dina anything and everything she can. She tells her with her words and her actions. Each conversation punctures a hole in her tightly sealed memories enough to let them spill out. She screams some nights, some days she presses herself into a corner and lashes out, always they end in measured breaths and gentle hands over hearts held long enough the beats sync up.

Each time they part feels like a goodbye in a new way.

There are moments when they fight, out of fear. They yell and push each other because their pieces don't fit as easily as they once did wondering if they ever will. If this is all an exercise in futility.

But love is work and love takes time.

Together over the years they sand down the edges and glue themselves back together. Ellie finds a pottery book and reads about kintsugi, breakage and repair is part of every objects history. What's broken can transform, not disfigure a piece. Together they pour gold in the cracks of what they've built, lacquer over what broke them in quiet reassurances at night, raising a son together, relearning each other inside and out, cherishing the old parts they loved while allowing the new parts to grow on them. To fall in love with imperfection.

Effort, choice, time. It's all love.

They love harder each day. Themselves, each other.

It's not perfect, it's not what it was, but in the end that's okay.

Because what they have is theirs and nothing can truly break what love can fix.

[selfdiscoveryjournal]

Sometimes I ask myself this question; why do we love someone so much that we put the person first before ourselves? Love is just so funny and complicated and not complicated right

[selfdiscoveryjournal]

Love is a funny concept. We love the imperfections of our partner but at the same time we see the person as perfect. We love and accept their imperfections but from the beginning we were looking for the perfect person. Funny right

[rineedagger]

Wanting someone for the potential you see in them is like jumping off a cliff expecting to fly. Don't mix dreams with reality, if you don't want to find yourself in the midst of confusion, unraveling the shreds between what's real and what isn't.

[juanmariapaz]

A complex hug.