Eclipse

The man I love stood on the front porch, wrapped in a blanket, as the Earth's umbra receded across the face of the moon against a backdrop of the pale blue dawn. 

We were born six thousand miles apart, on opposite sides of the spinning planet. Looking back, it's easy to see the threads of divine convergence weaving our lives together despite impossible odds: the handwritten note on an old cassette tape showed that his parents visited my Kansas birthplace at the turn of the century, unaware that their third son was waiting for them in an orphanage across the world or that the girl who would someday love him was only blocks away. 

We inched together, set in motion by the universe's harmonious systems of gravity — my family moved to Colorado the same year his family sent off the documents to finalize his adoption, our fledgling futures began to travel on parallel paths of education and service-minded purpose, pandemic upheaval moved me to his hometown at the same time that he opened his business — until we walked past each other by literal inches; he visited my church's booth at a Pride festival last summer and conversed with another staff member while I meticulously organized stickers beside them. 

Our paths finally crossed at the local county fair before the start of the market sheep show. We shook hands amid the pulsing crowd of people and livestock... I never expected to meet the love of my life with sawdust in my hair and chicken poop on my jeans. A few days later, while we sat on top of a picnic table at the park, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was on a first date for the last time. 

He traced constellations in the freckles on my arm and looked at me with eyes that sparkled with the sunset. "Do you want to get lost with me?"

Suddenly, all the dreams I'd crafted for myself were bigger, all the paths I'd paved for the course of my life grew wider and had flowers growing along the sidewalks. He made his way through my world with methodical precision in his gentleness, reopening doors I thought had been closed and sprinkling handfuls of stars into every sky I'd painted for myself. 

Staying in a mountain hostel and racing the rain clouds across a maze of bridges. Riding the gondola in Telluride to watch the leaves changing, the breeze sending them cascading all around us like sun-bathed confetti. Flying to New England for Christmas and walking hand-in-hand through an apple orchard decked out in a kaleidoscope of lights as the snow settled in our hair. Dancing nights away, eating ice cream from obscure roadside grocery stores, leading a civil rights march holding each side of a banner, howling with laughter as we watched movies in a nest of blankets. And in the quiet morning of a total lunar eclipse, as the crisp air began to carry the scent of spring, I finally understood that the romance novels weren't unrealistic fantasies, after all. 

He is the Riftan to my Maximilian, the Malcolm to my Katrina, the Frederick to my Gwendolyn. 

An exact alignment, a perfect coincidence, balanced at the pinnacle where shadow scatters when it meets the light.