🌷 To Wear Love
He arrived wearing his wound. She offered him something softer.
I recommend that you sit with this quote for a moment before you read. It inspired the story.
"The wound is the place where the light enters you," by Rumi.
Behind the Story
There are some lines you carry for years before you understand what they were asking of you.
The wound is the place where the light enters you.
I recall this didn’t make sense to me when I first read it. Then I lived a little. Traveled far. Learned about love, and the contrast of having loved. Now I read it as a reminder. And a how-to for the love that traces what hurts and stays anyway.
This scene is a tender moment. A man who has been wearing his pain like a coat for so long that it became the only thing keeping him warm. A woman willing to stay close enough to feel the cold he was hiding. Not flinching. Not fixing. Just there.
I wanted to write the moment a person stops bracing. Sometimes that shows up in moments of intimacy behind closed doors. The scars. The trauma. The hesitation. The breath after a long-held breath. Trust shows up first as a small permission.
It’s all right.
Two words that take a lifetime to receive.
Some loves arrive wanting your best self. The rare ones know how to sit with the worst. They become the warmth beyond the doubt. They wait until the cold veil lifts. They hold until the night stops feeling cold. They stay until you can sleep.
On the Visual Process
Creating this story was fun and challenging. It was one of my first illustrations to storyboard. I honed in on the feeling of the quote, bit by bit, until the scene came alive before my eyes like spoken word poetry.
I wanted this piece to feel like a low lamp in a dark room. The bedroom is all soft grays. The only color in the whole zine is on the cover. Her, for contrast. Peach. Bruised lavender. A white shirt big enough to disappear inside of. She wears it the way you wear borrowed grace. Loose, unguarded, his.
I loved the balcony serving as a backdrop to the night that had passed. Letting the reader fall into the cooing night and fill in the gaps of what conversations had transpired.
The balcony at the beginning is empty. A bottle. An ashtray is still smoking. Whatever happened out there is finished. They left it behind to go inside, and the night they walked away from is still humming on the rail.
Despite being a comic-style scene, his and her expressions add to the intimacy. She is ready and willing. He is trusting her and is open to being guided every step of the way. She genuinely loves him, and he, despite his doubt, embraces her. She doesn’t judge him for it.
By the last panel, intimacy gets to look the way it feels. Cosmic, slow, and quietly enormous. The bodies kept their outlines but lost their weight. There is starlight where the body should be, and warmth they have somehow made between them, holding both of them still inside the dark.
Her hand finds his chest. His hands hold her at the thighs, the way you hold a thing you’d be ruined to lose.
Some kinds of closeness, I think, were always going to be drawn as stars.
Some loves we wear once. The rare ones we wake up in.
✦
A Question for You
Has anyone ever stayed for the weight you’d been carrying alone?