Love In The Shadowing

How we try to love when our hearts are still healing from who we had to become.

There are kinds of love we don’t speak about in daylight.
Loves tucked into corners.
Loves that never bloomed, but still left petals in our chest.

“Love in the shadowing – forbidden relationships held in a container of hurt.”

These loves are not wrong.
They are simply shaped by circumstance, by silence,
by the weight of what we didn’t yet know how to carry.

Sometimes, we meet someone in the exact shape of our unhealed wounds.
And it feels like truth.
But it’s a truth filtered through pain –
like light through stained glass.
Beautiful, fractured, holy –
but not whole.

When our nervous systems are still wired for defence,
love can feel like a threat.
We want to reach, but we flinch.
We want to open, but we brace.

And so we find ourselves in the shadowing –
loving in ways that protect us from being truly seen.

We ration our softness.
We hide our longings.
We chase the unavailable and call it fate.

We confuse chemistry with chaos.

And yet… even here, even in the shadow…
we are still trying.
Still loving.
Still longing to be met.

“How do you want to receive… and be received?”

There is no shame in having loved from your wounds.
There is only the quiet invitation to love from your healing.

To unlearn the dance of almosts.
To give yourself the safety you never had.
To meet love not as proof of your worth,
but as the gentle reflection of it.

Because when love moves from the shadow into the light –
it doesn’t lose its depth.
It gains its freedom.

In Tenderness,

A. J. Ashé | Being Human