STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT

To love is to suffer. To love is to lose. He had learned it too young to forget it, inscribed on the flesh, like a scar that we try to hide under everyday clothes. But she, with her eyes where both the gentleness and the anger of life danced, made him wonder if it was really true.

"I thought I had buried all that. I thought I could do this job without thinking about it. Without feeling it."

"We don't choose what happens to us. But we do choose what we do afterward. You're strong, Mr. Higuruma, you just don't know it yet."

In the shadow of his doubts still flourished the fragile idea of a forbidden happiness ⸺ a dream so insane that he had stopped believing in it a long time ago. Because perhaps, sometimes, loving is not just about suffering, but about believing, about hoping that the light will conquer fear, to accept that wounds never completely disappear, but that we can learn to live with them.

And in a corner of his heart, which he thought was dead and frozen, he felt the possibility of a future being born, not without pain, no, but perhaps less alone.

©Jujutsu Kaisen, Gege Akutami
Book cover and story by ©noriakea__