She was in love with someone else the entire time I was in love with her. This was not a secret. She told me directly, early, with kindness. I said I understood and I thought I did and then I spent two years proving I didn't.

I want to resist the narrative where I'm the tragic victim of this story. I chose to stay close. I told myself the proximity was friendship while using the friendship to sustain a feeling that proximity could not resolve. That's not something that was done to me. That was a choice, made repeatedly, in full knowledge.

What I keep returning to is not the loss itself but the specific nature of the desire. I didn't want her to be different - I wanted to be the person she wanted. And she wanted someone who wasn't me, not because anything was wrong with me but because desire isn't an evaluation. It doesn't distribute according to merit. I knew this. Knowing it did not help. Knowledge is not the instrument that governs wanting.

The two years ended when she moved away with him. I was at the going-away party. I helped carry things to the van. There's a particular cruelty in being someone's good friend - in being trusted and valued and present - and finding that the exact qualities that made you their friend are not the qualities that made you matter in the way you needed to matter.

I'm not still in love with her. That left eventually. What stayed was the question it asked about desire: why this person and not another? What is that aimed at, and why won't it be redirected?