Eclipse.

I used to think that love was a total eclipse, 
that the most profound way to show someone that you loved them was to let them overtake you, turn your entire sky the same hue as theirs. 
Self-sacrifice, the willingness to lose yourself in someone else. 

So that was how I loved. 
Your life became mine. Your time, your humor, your references, but never your emotions. Never your inner workings, your thoughts, your fears.
Your music soundtracked my life, your films became my culture. 
Your mother, your brothers, your dad adopted me into your family, seamlessly. 
You never let me forget that I was only there because you "let" me be. 
As if I ever asked. 
As if I wouldn't have still said yes.

It never occurred to me, until it was way too late, that it wasn't reciprocal. 
My boxes moved into the room that you shared with someone else. 
Every surface in that house, touched by another girl's hand not long before mine.
I never stood a chance. My fingerprints hardly smudged the black ink of hers. 

And so I lost myself, hardly nineteen, in what I thought was love. The shadows descended inch by inch across the willow tree in your front yard. 
(I watched it get torn down, asked the landscapers for a part of the trunk as a keepsake for you. You let it rot in the garage). 
But I was vibrant when we first met, wasn't I? Wasn't I like the sun?  
(You told me months later that I seemed like I was shining the first time that we met).
You were the moon then, I could see it in your eyes. I used to ask you how you were each day that I saw you, even while hardly knowing you. 
At the end, you told me you were tired of hearing me cry myself to sleep at night. 
I guess my sensitivity was only attractive before you knew where it came from.

You were right about you not being the one for me, even then. Especially then. 

All of the things I asked for, the things that I expected, were never unrealistic.
("Relationships aren't like movies or Taylor Swift songs, Carlotta."
"Expectations only get you hurt.") 
You just didn't want them with me.

Now, 
He never lets me go to bed without knowing that I'm loved. 
He kisses me before he leaves, every time, and I never have to ask. 
(That once caused an argument, didn't it.)
My days have not had to miss his voice.  
He's told me he loves me more in one night than you did in three years.
He hugs me, kisses me, holds me, no questions asked. No hesitations, eye-rolls, or scoffs.

I once told him that I wish that I got to love him years ago, that I knew he was out there somewhere. I meant it then and I mean it now. I shouldn't have had to know the pain of you. I didn't deserve that. 

"My smoking gun
My eclipsed sun
This has broken me down
My twisted knife
My sleepless night."  

Never again.