For as long as I have been alive I have loved too much. Friends, family, I burned from the force of my love. It was almost like I was trying to make up for the lack of love in the world, that maybe I could extinguish the darkness in the world if I burned brightly enough. I am the girl that always understands, always has a kind word, always loves everybody and anything.

It was after I was eighteen years old that I started to burn out. I had burned so brightly, ignoring the regret, the loss, the pain, for so long, that I started to yearn for someone that I couldn’t love.

He was cold, calculating, sometimes cruel. For the life of me, I couldn’t love him. He was perfect.

For so long I had been selfless, and even as I started to burn out I couldn’t help but love. He was my one selfish act.

We dove in, both knowing that it would end. And when that end came, it wouldn’t be the end of all things, it wouldn’t the end of beauty, it wouldn’t be tragic.

It felt so good to be selfish for once, to be able to scream at him when I was angry, to be honest, not caring what he though. It felt even better not to really care when he did the same.

It wasn’t ever a fairytale.

He spent long nights at the office, a rising business executive. I spent long nights doing working on charities, scraping by a living on odd jobs that didn’t interfere with my volunteering. Complete opposites, the two of us.

My mother cried when I informed her of our engagement.

To this day I think he only married me to get rid of any religious qualms I had against being with him. We didn’t exchange vows, just signed the marriage certificate. I moved in, and life continued as before, only I didn’t have to work my odd jobs. And the death of my childhood fantasies about a loving marriage and endless fantasies wasn’t the end of all things, it wasn’t the end of beauty, it wasn’t tragic.

Still, we were looking for the end. Marriage didn’t change anything, really. We knew the end would come one day. Even that wouldn’t change much. He was not the beginning of my universe, or the end, nor was I his. We just were.

We found the end we had kept an eye out for so long five years after marrying. But it wasn’t the end we had searched for.

I had lymphoma. Cancer, stage four. Nothing the doctors could do for me, except send me home. Only then did we realize that for all these years, there had been love, just not what I had always thought love was. Because here, at the end of all things, was the end of all the beauty that I had ever known, the end of the love that burned so cold I could never tell it was even there.

And it was tragic.