Mojo and the Mess

There’s a kind of love that doesn’t get talked about much.

Not the movie kind, not the storybook kind — the kind that happens in the quiet, in the waiting, in the middle of the night when fear won’t stop whispering.

It’s the kind that keeps showing up, even when everything feels uncertain.

Loving someone who’s sick is loving someone who’s scared all the time — and still choosing them anyway. It’s loving through scans, side effects, and sleepless nights. It’s holding someone together while you’re falling apart yourself.

You want to fix it. You want to make it better.

You want to trade places so they can have a day off from pain, from worry, from being the strong one. But you can’t. So you just… stay.

You sit next to them in the silence that says more than any words could. You memorize the rise and fall of their chest. You count the breaths like proof that they’re still here.

And for the person who’s always scared — for people like me — love looks different too.

I don’t always have the energy to be soft or romantic. Sometimes my love is quiet, tired, or buried under fear. Sometimes it looks like snapping out of frustration or withdrawing because I don’t want to be a burden. But underneath all that noise, it’s still love — stubborn and unshakable.

When I look at him — at Pete — I see what love looks like when it’s weathered by fear. I see the exhaustion in his eyes that he tries to hide from me. The way he pretends not to notice when I flinch from pain. The way he still cracks jokes when my anxiety spikes, just to get me to smile for half a second.

He loves me even when it hurts him to do it.

He loves me even when I push him away because I’m terrified of what’s coming.

He loves me through the moments I can’t stand to look at myself — and that kind of love feels like grace.

There’s this thing that happens when you live with constant fear — your body never really relaxes. Your mind is always scanning for danger, waiting for the next bad news, the next ache, the next call. And yet somehow, he’s become the one place I still feel safe.

That’s what people don’t talk about enough:

Loving someone who’s scared all the time means you live in that fear too. You start to carry their panic in your own chest. You start to dread appointments, blood draws, the sound of the phone. You learn what it means to love someone who might not get forever — and still show up like you do.

Love like that doesn’t get a fairytale ending.

But it gets something just as rare: honesty.

It’s raw, it’s real, and it’s heavy — but it’s ours.

And maybe that’s what real love looks like:

Not running when it gets hard.

Not pretending you’re not afraid.

Just choosing each other, over and over again, in a world that keeps trying to take pieces away.

Because when everything else feels uncertain — when fear is the only thing that feels familiar — love is still the only thing that makes staying possible.

And even when it can’t save me, it saves something.

It saves the part of me that still believes I’m worth loving.

It saves the part of him that still finds laughter in the mess.

It saves us.

🐾 Mojo’s POV

I don’t really understand the words you two whisper in the dark,

but I know what love sounds like.

It’s the soft way he says your name when you’re half-asleep.

It’s the way your breathing evens out when his hand finds yours.

It’s the quiet in the room when you’re both scared,

but still choosing to stay right there anyway.

When you cry, I move closer.

When he worries, I rest my head on his leg.

When the fear fills the space between you, I make it smaller —

because that’s my job. To remind you both that love doesn’t fix everything,

but it stays.

Even in the mess.

Especially there.

— Mojo 🐾

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