The flowers arrived at your door with a note saying ‘eight’ and you started getting ready at five, your stomach trembling with butterflies. The night passed nothing like a fairytale but that’s not what you needed. You needed real, and straight up, and honest. He most certainly obliged as you ran into his ex and he spent the next hour angrily ranting about the year of his life he wasted on her.

The kiss goodnight was interrupted by your brother, who showed up out of the blue. You weren’t angry though because it enabled you to spend the rest of the night talking to someone about how happy he made you and the connection you had; the enchanting emerald green of his eyes. Your brother always called after that.

You started to discover that fairytales are unrealistic, but that feeling, the one you get at the end of those movies, when the lovers ride off into the sunset… That's attainable. It comes quite easily, when he’s talking passionately, his cheeks turning pink with energy. But you’re not listening, are you? You’re watching his face and how his eyes shine. And it comes when he stops you in whatever you’re doing, draws you up in his arms, and kisses you.

He whispered your name in the dark and let your heart know that you would never be alone again. He held you close and you let his fingers tickle your skin as they crawled down your spine and lower. You smiled as he breathed words into your ear and ran his fingers through your hair. The feeling, in those moments, was a simple one: forever.

The shape and rythm of your life soon changed to match his. You found yourself scheduling your time around him, and it might have bothered your friends, but it never seemed to bother you. You didn’t mind not going out with the girls if it meant you could stay in with him on his night off. It was simple logic to make time for him, right?

Tension would come and go and the word ‘space’ was brought up every once in a while, but soon forgotten after a kiss turned to more. Plans were made, far off ones, and as the buying of tickets and searching for houses progressed, you started to feel safe. This was as far as you had ever gotten, and in the mindset of this being ‘It’, you unknowingly stopped working so hard to keep it.

No one knows, or understands, why it happened. Everyone had thought, as you did, that you would still be holding hands and kissing in the park at eighty years old. That you would do everything possible to spoil all your grandkids. Everything possible to stay together. But the unkown is just that; and how could you have known?