By Ces Suarez, Roj Faelnar, Joshua Mendoza, Samuelle Jagonio, Clara Canta, Allysa Capoquian || Graphics by Rei Alinsub

If love were only romantic, many of us would be unloved. When we measure love only by whether we have someone to call ours on February 14, we overlook the many ways we are already held.

The absence of that kind of love can feel—almost accusatory—as if the day itself requires a partner. But love has never been narrow. It lives in places far less dramatic and far more enduring: in the friends who stay, in the hands that raised us, and in the small, daily acts that ask for no spotlight. 

The Love That Sees Beyond The Face 

Friendship, for as long as I have known its name, had people enter and leave my life as if they never cared to stay. With that, I learned to protect myself by keeping certain parts of me hidden, fearing they were too fragile for anyone else to hold. And so, I categorized the people I met into three sections: those who knew my face, those who knew my marrow, and those who knew my truths rotting beneath my ribs. It was a flawed system, but a system nevertheless—one I hope that would guide me and show me the people worthy of sharing my rib with.

Friendship, I have learned, isn’t just easy laughter or hands held only in daylight. It is the quiet ease of resting your heads against one another in total understanding. It is the bravery and the embrace to occupy spaces no one ever seems to settle in. While I have only known shards of my people for a short time, it feels as if I have carried them further and further. With them, I was taught to remain loud, and louder wherever I go, to implore grace within myself, and to live a life not of certainty, but of learning.

For this, I am eternally grateful. I am grateful to have found the people who became the answered prayers whispered in solitude. I am grateful for the way that they hold the weight of my truths without complaint and  for choosing to return to me every day. To them, I give nothing less than a piece of my rib.

The Love That Fit Inside a Paper Bag

I grew up in a small town called Sogod. It was never famous, but those who knew it spoke softly of its beaches and the unhurried rhythm of provincial life. Within that geography of sea breeze and tricycle engines, I loved one place specifically: Mayong’s Bakeshop & Snackhouse. 

Every day at two in the afternoon, a new batch of bread would emerge from the ovens. My family, as if summoned by something sacred, would begin our small pilgrimage for monay, cheese rolls, and shakoy. It was such a simple habit—almost trivial—yet in its repetition lived something steady and profound: care expressed in coconut-filled bread. It was never just bread. It was two o’clock. It was family. It was knowing exactly where I belonged.

Time, of course, has a way of stretching us away from such rituals. I have grown older; the glass display at Mayong’s has yellowed, and the once-familiar scent has grown faint in my memory. 

But sometimes, when I pass a bakery and catch that familiar fragrance of sugar and yeast drifting into the air, I feel something small and bright tug at my heart. I am back on those roads, the afternoon sun above us, the panadero placing three pan de cocos into a paper bag. I remember then that love does not always arrive in bouquets or love letters; sometimes it arrives warm, slightly sweet, and shared without fuss, and inside a paper bag. 

The First Form of Love We Meet

Before infatuation, before the trembling thrill of crushes, there was a love that paused its own exhaustion to sit beside me and explain equations I was too frustrated to solve. A love that folded away unfinished paperwork to help with mathematics and physics. A love that thinned its own savings just to place a Lego set into the eager hands of a child who believed the world could be assembled from colored bricks. 

This love preceded my first cry. It was there in the hush before my birth, in the anxious prayers spoken over a life not yet held. Parental love is not loud; it is foundational. It is the ground beneath the house—unseen, yet carrying everything.

Yet, I am not always gentle with it. 

During arguments, it is frighteningly easy to forget the devotion that has held me upright for years. Anger narrows my vision until I see only the present fracture, not the history of hands that steadied my first steps or applauded my earliest, clumsiest victories.

But never for long. 

I remember the sleepless nights they surrendered without complaint, the silent recalculations of their dreams so mine could expand. My first word was spoken into their waiting silence; my first step was taken toward their open arms.

So when I think of Valentine’s Day, I do not first think of crushes or flowers. I think of the love that loved me first. 

The Love Of A Writer’s Bump

I first noticed the bump on my right ring finger when I was seven, half-asleep in English class. After what felt like the hundredth loop of a lowercase g, the skin on my finger had risen red and tender, as if protesting the pressure of my pencil.  To little me, it looked like an abnormality—something gone wrong. To me now, a decade and countless journal entries later, it feels like more of a testament of years of desperate attempts of preserving memory into paper.

I have always written with more force than necessary, as though pressing harder might make the moment stay. At the end of every day, I make it a habit to crack open a lamp and my journal and write about the golden light I’d caught weaving through the leaves of my favorite trees during the walk I’d had with my friends. On some days, I’d write letters I’d never send and keep rewriting them until the paper softened at the creases, my affection spilling helplessly at the mercy of my pen.  Relentlessly pressing down out of desperation to put a name on the warmth that floods my heart and engrave it onto something that would make it last forever. This act of love is what gives me life and there’s nothing more that makes life worth living than the people in mine. 

Over the years, the bump only grew—rougher, more defined—formed by an urgency I could never quite explain. A quiet desperation to remember as many days of my life as possible before they slipped away. And so the skin thickened where the pen met my finger, as if my body itself refused to forget.

To buggy bumps and blooming flowers. To the small marks that proved we have lived, and loved, and tried to make it last.

The Love I Did Not Notice 

For a long time, I believed that friendship had to be loud to be real. I measured it by late-night conversations, constant updates, inside jokes posted for everyone to see. And when I looked at my own friendships—quiet, unassuming, rarely demanding—I wondered if there was something wrong with me and my friends. 

We did not narrate every detail of our lives to one another. We did not fill weekends with grand plans. Sometimes, I felt as though I barely knew them at all. I’ll admit that at one point, I found myself imagining how life would be if I sought friendship elsewhere, in people louder and bolder. 

But time has a gentle way of correcting what insecurity distorts. I realized that our relationship was exactly the space we needed to grow. The reason our friendship was quiet was not because it was shallow. Rather, it was because it had become such a sure thing that it no longer needed to shout for attention. It lived in the doodles in the margins of our notebooks, in the quiet assurance that no matter how long the pause, we would return to one another without hesitation.

Love As A Matter Of Possibility

Theory claims that the infinite universe has an inexhaustible amount of matter. Love, as intangible as it is, follows the same laws that govern matter. It cannot be created nor destroyed, only conserved and converted into newer forms. We are all born taking up space. In our initially small forms of mass is a body made up of matter and I believe to also be full of love. The best part about theory is that it leaves room for possibility. An infinite universe means an infinite amount of ways that love can prevail, with my favorite perspective being that love cannot be fostered without community.

There has always been a friend, a parent, or a mentor that has taught me a new way to love. Through trust, belief, and the knowledge that my existence holds weight, love has fueled my life with its endless generosity. Where uncertainty usually breeds fear, I am only comforted by the infinity of this feeling, the possibility of the companionship that will continuously welcome me in the future. So, as a being of matter, it’s only in my nature that I continue to love despite it all.

The Love We All Have

Love refuses to be bound by a single meaning. Because of this, love is less a definition and more a perception; it shifts depending on who is looking and what they have survived.

A child may know it as protection. A friend may recognize it as understanding. A parent may practice it as devotion without applause. To explore love, then, is not to confine it to one meaning, but to listen to the many ways people have learned to recognize it in their own lives.