You grow up knowing she is the brightest star in the sky. She is the greatest creation to come from the galaxy. Her hair is the color of sunshine, her eyes the boldest of sapphires, her skin moonlight white, and her hands are gentle like flower petals.

They ask you when you first fell in love with her, but you are unable to say. There is no answer. You have always been. You can’t remember a moment in your lifetime when you were not bewitched by her essence.

When you are children you do anything to see her smile. When she wanted to run left, you went left, when she wanted to climb the tallest hill, you followed after her, huffing and afraid, when she broke her arm and could not swim, you spent all summer pushing her on an old swing set and it is one of your best memories. You used to share ice cream cones, play hide-and-seek, chase butterflies, and sleep in your treehouse holding each others’ hand. Those days were easy. Those days you two were unfazed by the world; uncorrupted by anything else. Childhood faded too soon.

 When you are teenagers you grow taller and wider, built to conquer the world, and she remains fragile. She is the outcome of screaming and the shatter of broken things invading her homelife. For a long time you don’t mention it because she refuses to accept it. She believes she’s caught in a nightmare she can wake up from. But you know it’s real—her tragic reality. It is painfully obvious in the bruises she covers up with long-sleeves and makeup.Your soul cracks at the seams when she flinches at your touch; her gaze fearful of your strength. It always takes her a minute, but she inhales and remembers who you are. Sometimes in the safe haven that is your treehouse she cries it all out. You never speak. You just embrace her, holding your breath. Her sobs remain scratched onto the wooden walls around you. You’re terrified you will always hear them echo. You press her closer into your chest and hope she can hear how your heart beats for her. You want to tell her that she will always be safe with you. You want to tell her she will never be cold again beside you. You want to tell her that your level of caring runs deeper than she can possibly imagine, but you bite your tongue. Maybe you’re a coward, but for now all you can do is hold her and take her pain.

Teenage trauma ends with flying graduation caps. You don’t want to leave her. All your life you two have spent it attached to the hip, but there is nothing you can do to halt the progression of life. She is going to the university of her dreams and you to yours. With a squeeze to your hand she tells you that you will see each other every weekend (your campuses are only forty miles from each other) and she promises to call every day until you get sick of hearing her voice. You stop yourself from telling her how every word that leaves her mouth is the greatest symphony ever composed. When she leaves, smiling wide, your hand still tingles and you believe her. It takes two months of adjusting to college life, but Friday night she shows up at your dorm. Being away from the blackhole her homelife is does her wonders—she’s radiant. Her skin is flawless, untouched by black and purple. You hug her tightly, sweeping her off the ground. Her laughter ignites electricity up your spine, her face buried in your neck is overwhelming, and her adoring eyes are heaven when they clash with yours. In that second of time you’re ready to tell her you love her—truly love her—but your roommate enters the room and takes your chance. You don’t know it in that moment, but it is love at first sight for her.

 She spends the next seven years in love with your friend and you spend them in the sidelines. Unaware of you, she pines after him and he flirts without ever committing to her. She will date others guys, offering her heart to anyone but you. She doesn’t even see that you’ve been waiting your entire life for her to notice you. But you want her to be happy. You will do anything to see a smile on her face. Even if it shatters your heart into dust, you play matchmaker. She’s a beautiful mess when she gets ready for a first date with your friend. Her sunshine hair gets curled, her sapphire eyes are lined with indigo, and her lithe body gets covered in a flirty dress. She has the glow of the stars on her skin. She is breathtaking—then again she’s always been. Even in the years when she could not look at her reflection without wanting to claw her skin off you thought she was the prettiest girl in the world. You pray the date is a disaster as she walks out the door, but you don’t know in that moment that they will spend the next two years in a relationship.

 It ends in a catastrophe. He turns out to be challenged when it comes to loving only one person at a time. When she shows up at your door, sapphire eyes dripping, her ruby heart breaking into a thousand pieces, you collect her in your arms and let her cry. She tells you she loves him so fucking much that she might actually die without him. How can she go on without him? You don’t answer her because you have been trying to live without her all this time and are still as addicted as the first day.

 You are twenty-eight and you know it is time to move on. With passing months she patches her heart and begins to believe there are plenty of fish in the sea. Every night you want her to end up curled in your arms, gazing at the stars to form patterns like you once did when you were children. But she ends up with another and you just can’t take it anymore. Watching her melt into someone, kiss other lips, whisper those three words you have dreamt her saying in return to you is excruciating. You drag your body, tired and wounded, and board a plane. She calls you fifteen times that morning and you don’t answer. You don’t answer for a year.

 When you see each other again at the corner bakery you both love, she cries. You thought she would be angry; you expect her to punch you, smack you, yell at you for abandoning her, but she just hugs you. She clings on to you like a rock keeping her from drifting out to the treacherous ocean. A year later and she still feels like home. You back away from her arms and you tell her you are getting married. You met a photographer in Paris. She’s nice. She’s comfortable. She is just what you need.

They meet and it’s uncomfortable how well they get along. Your photographer asks your star to be a bridesmaid.

One night your star and you find yourselves in your apartment, a bottle of vodka shoved into the crease of the sofa cushions. ‘To hell with a bachelor party’, you said. ‘We’ll have fun together’, she replied. So there you two are, sitting on your sofa, watching your favorite film, spitting back the lines in cheap imitation. She inches closer to you; like old times, she rests her head on your chest and you automatically wrap an arm around her. She whispers an I miss you and every cell in your body that loves her wakes up from the coma you forced them into.

You get up from your seat—it’s insane to have assumed you can forget her. It is insane to think that you can be around her and not love her as fervently as you do. ‘We can’t be friends’, you tell her, silently thanking the vodka for the courage.

She’s startled. Blindsided. ‘Why?’ she breathes out.

‘Because I left to get away from you,’ you confess.‘Because I can’t keep loving you the way I do. I’ve spent all my life watching you be in love with other guys, and it hurts every fucking time. I thought I could forget you, but I see now that I have to carve my heart out of my chest for that to happen. So in order for me to be happy—to have a shot at being happy with someone who actually loves me back—I can’t have you around. I need to give you up so my life can make sense—which is bullshit since you’re the only thing that ever makes sense to me. But I need to find another reason for breathing that isn’t you, so please....Please just go.’

It’s your wedding day, but all you can do is see her in every face you pass. When the music starts you hope to see her walking down that aisle to you, but she isn’t. Your brain tells your heart to stay, to make the logical choice, to choose comfort, but your feet start moving and now you’re running. You don’t know where you are going, but you don’t stop.

You end up at your old treehouse, where it all began. When you climb up, your back protesting the constraint of your height, you find her there. In a beautiful bridesmaid dress, she dangles her legs from the ledge. When her sapphire gaze finds you she does not seem the least bit surprised. Nor are you to see her there—your heart took you home.

‘I was gonna go,’ she tells you quietly, ‘but I kept imagining it...You marrying her. It hurt. I didn’t want to be there and pretend I‘d be fine not having you in my life because it’s impossible.’ She turns to you, her tears rolling down her rosy cheeks. ‘I didn’t know how to be without you when you left. It wasn’t until you came back that I realized all that time I was holding my breath...Everything makes sense when you’re here.’

She reaches for your hand, and for the first time you see her notice how perfectly her fingers fit in the spaces between yours. You hold on tightly.

‘All this time I was trying to find you in other people,’ she continues, ‘and you were always right in front of me.’

Your dreams do not live up to the reality of kissing her. Her mouth on yours is the breath of life, a destiny you have spent your entire life trying to find. Her heart beats in the same rhythm as yours, her hands touching you with the same worship you have of her is everything you ever want to feel for the rest of your days. She is it. She is the one. And you never want to think of the time when she was not yours. All you two have is the bright future ahead—and you know it will be painted in the color of her eyes, in the warmth of her sunshine tresses, and it’ll be as passionate and all-consuming as the galaxies that live inside her ribcage.