Story Spotlight: (Volume I) My Love Has No Bounds
My Love Has No Bounds is the first story in the collection, and in many ways it sets the tone for everything that follows: a hard world, an old truth, and ordinary people trying to remain human when survival keeps asking for something sharp in return.
It begins with this whakataukī: 'Ka nui taku aroha ki a koe'
That meaning mattered to me deeply when I wrote this story, because I didn’t want love to sit there looking decorative and noble while the world burned in the background. I wanted it to have weight. I wanted it to cost something. I wanted it to mean more than feeling.
In this story, love is work.
It is endurance. It is hunger shared. It is choosing caution over comfort. It is walking towards the rumour of green under a sky that has forgotten how to be blue. It is a father carrying hope in one hand and fear in the other, trying to get his son to a place where breathing deeply does not feel like a gamble.
The world of the story is harsh, ash-choked, and stripped back to essentials. Birds are gone. The air bites. Even memory has become a kind of rationing. And yet, at the centre of it all, there is still tenderness. Dry humour. Stubbornness. The little scraps of ordinary love that somehow survive after nearly everything else has fallen apart.
That is why this story means so much to me.
At heart, it is not really about apocalypse, though the apocalypse certainly hasn’t helped matters. It is about the shape love takes when there is nothing easy left. It asks what a parent’s love becomes in a broken world — not in speeches, not in grand gestures, but in decisions. In sacrifice. In the practical business of keeping someone alive long enough to reach something better.
That is one of the reasons this whakataukī struck me so powerfully here.
'Ka nui taku aroha ki a koe' is not small. It is not sentimental. It is not passive. In this story, it becomes shelter. It becomes persistence. It becomes the refusal to let the world have the final word.
And because I apparently cannot resist making readers suffer before offering them a sliver of hope, the story walks through ash, grief, danger, exhaustion, and the sort of future where even a piece of fruit can feel miraculous.
Especially a piece of fruit.
There is a line between bleakness and honesty, and I always try to write on the honest side of it. The world in this story is damaged, yes, but the point is not despair. The point is that even here — here of all places — love still acts. It still carries. It still protects. It still says: keep going.
That is why it is my favourite.
It carries the spirit of the whole series in miniature: old wisdom meeting future hardship, not as decoration, but as instruction. The whakataukī does not sit politely at the top of the page. It moves through the story like a pulse. It shapes what matters. It asks what love really is when stripped of comfort and convenience.
The answer, at least in this story, is that love is practical. Love is stubborn. Love is maintenance. Love is sharing water when you are thirsty yourself. Love is saying no to danger even when your child is hungry. Love is doing the necessary thing, then getting up the next day and doing it again.
Which is not glamorous, but then neither is survival.
I’ve also shared this video for My Love Has No Bounds over on X and TikTok, because some stories arrive with images already attached to them. This one always did. The bruised sky. The long walk. The rumour of green. The hard, aching tenderness of it. If you’ve already watched the video, thank you. If not, it’s there waiting for you.
This story is the first step into Whakataukī Among the Stars: Volume I.
It begins, as many important things do, with love.
Not the easy kind.
The active kind.
The kind with mud on its boots and ash in its lungs.
The kind that keeps walking.
— Rebecca
Comments
Post a Comment