It was finally warm enough that I only grabbed my jacket as an afterthought. The jacket that has since been abandoned in the same car that brought me to you on that warm May night. We were late, like always, you had already expected as much from our mutual friends whose habits were already familiar to you. I walked in with an air of trumped up confidence on heels that were worn to make me stand taller than I felt. I scanned the room until my eyes fell on your face for the first time. I can’t imagine what I might have looked like to you in that moment. Could you already see the stars in my eyes I wonder? Was my stomach turning inside out as transparent as I felt it was. I’ve told you since how I almost panicked, rushing to the bar to order a drink to calm down before working up the impossible nerve to choose a seat next to you.

This moment felt surreal because to me you still seemed like something I might have dream up, the picture of the man I always wanted, but never felt like I deserved. What could have been the awkward and stalled conversations of two people getting to know each other instead seems to ease its way along while we spent the night surrounded by crowds of people but acting like we were the only two people in the room.

Since that first night, on the first warm breaths of summer air, you have become so much more to me that I ever imagined. You see, I had spent sometime pinning down all the qualities I thought another person should possess for the next person I would love. I thought I needed every romantic notion and the kind of person that only existed in my dreams. You were all at once everything I thought I always wanted and also nothing at all like I expected. Meeting you has made me realize that romanticized ideas about what other people should are should not be and qualities we think we need an another person don’t really exist at all.

You are exactly what I never knew I needed. Your quiet grace and confidence offsets my outgoing and gregarious nature. While I am exceedingly overwhelming, you are continuously understated. In many ways, I always used to describe myself as the sun. Radiant and ever shining, basking the the glow of those who celebrated my ever move. But you, you are much more the moon. Soft glowing and understated, so rarely drawing attention to your presence unless you are one who chooses to behold it. I used to be afraid of the night, its depth and wonder mysterious and blurring everything at the edges. But you have illuminated my night sky from the moment I met you. The tides of my ever-raging soul finally finding guidance. I used to think the sun and the moon couldn’t exist together, lunar eclipses always did seem too fleeting to last. But maybe the two, both so beautiful in their own right, were always meant to balance out each other. You my dear, eclipsed me from the moment we met, making me finally see the true magic of a summer night sky. I will happily now be guided by the moonlight.