Epilogue
Today – JAKE
THE GREATEST THING you’ll ever do is love.
For a long time, I thought that was bullshit. Thought it was just another pretty lie wrapped in the lyric of another stupid love song. Something people clung to so they didn’t have to admit how badly love can break you down.
Part of that might have been true. But there’s so much more to it than that.
There is something brave about falling in love.
Something terrifying and feral and undeniably rich.
Because loving someone means walking into the one thing that can absolutely destroy you.
It means loading the gun yourself and passing it to the other person while they aim it directly at you.
Eyes open. Heart exposed. No armor left to hide behind.
Love isn’t safe. It isn’t neat. It doesn’t come with guarantees or easy escapes. It asks you to give pieces of yourself away without knowing if you’ll ever get them back. And that’s exactly what makes it courageous.
There is nothing weak about choosing to be vulnerable in a world that teaches you to only protect yourself, hide all your wrongs, and run before you ever expose them.
Love doesn’t save you in the way fairy tales promise.
It doesn’t erase your past or make you whole overnight.
But it does something better—it changes you.
It forces you to feel more deeply than you ever thought possible.
It teaches you who you are when everything is on the line and who you're willing to be for the sake of someone else.
Love takes, yes, but it also gives. It gives moments so bright they burn themselves into your memory forever, branding themselves onto your soul. A hand reaching for yours in the night. A voice that grounds you. A feeling so big it rewrites your definition of life and everything in it.
It’s true that if it ends, you’re left with wreckage. With bloodied hands and broken pieces and the ache of what once was. You’re left there wondering how it collapsed so quietly and went out with a bang you never expected.
But you’re also left with proof.
Proof that you didn’t stand still. That you didn’t just lie there and do nothing when you could have.
You took a road never knowing where it would lead you, and you walked the miles—the ones that bruised your feet and cracked your ribs and changed the shape of your heart forever.
And you did it with nothing but a crumbled-up map, sewn with stolen dreams and hope.
The scars we bear aren’t failures. They’re the mile markers. The evidence that you went somewhere. That you existed. That you loved hard enough to lose yourself and were brave enough to find your way back.
That’s all life is, anyway, right? Just one long, unforgiving, twisting, winding road full of turns you never saw coming. It’s a journey the whole way. And you’re in for one hell of a ride.
But the love? The loss? Everything in between?
They’re what we need to be whole. They’re the experience we need to gain so we can get to where we’re going.
They’re the miles that make us.
And they’re always worth it.
Every single one.