Her lips curved perfectly, forming a seducing smile etched with pink coral lipstick. It wasn't hard to figure out why she was able to captivate everyone with her charm.

She was beautiful, she was smart, caring and loving. She was kind; yet she wasn't compassionate. She was rational and understood reasoning but did not comprehend ethics.

She was his best friend and she stole my love. My only love.

She always knew what to say when things went bad, the words to utter when he was feeling bad. She was constantly there for him. He trusted her- more than he trusted me. I was the love of his life and she was the best friend who meant the world to him.

I was merely the full stop that was stuck between two intersecting lines. As clueless and naive as one can be. Stupidly in love.

In a strange twist of fate, the pain of that loss was what allowed me to overcome my fear, doubt, and self-loathing, (almost like the grief drowned every other emotion out so they no longer had any power) and drove me to leap head-first into things I wanted to do.

If she had taken the time to get to know me, she'd have never given him the time of day to cheat. I'd never have fallen in love with him in the first place, and I'd never had this transformative painful experience that altered the course of my life, and gave me everything that I had been looking for but didn't know how to find.

It was all terrible, don't get me wrong. It's only 8 months later that I can look back to it and make these observations with any sort of gratitude. And it's definitely a bittersweet feeling. Sweet because they are happily married now. Bitter, because I cry every night thinking about the possibilities and what-ifs.

I don't know why I felt compelled to share this. Maybe, to point out that people fumbling around in the dark and making mistakes of one another isn't always such a bad thing, even though it feels that way. Perhaps, the mistake is done out of selfishness or possessiveness. I can’t tell.

Initially, I felt violated. As she kissed his shoulders that still bore faint marks of my love bites, I felt hurt. She stained his lips that still lingered with the taste of my strawberry balm. I bit my lips till it bled that night. As she caressed his black hair ever so softly that once rested on my laps waiting to be held.

Breaks up didn’t hurt much, no. The thoughts about another woman in a place that I should have been ripped my heart-string off. He was mine. ‘Was’ is a strange word. Now, he belongs to her.

You can steal people, but you can't steal love. At least, so I thought.

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