I hadn’t seen his mom in nearly a year. She said, “I don’t ask questions except to make sure you’re both doing okay; that’s all that matters.” I replied, “Thank you. We wouldn’t have many answers anyway.”

This is the truth: here now we embark on a new adventure, an unpaved path. We are neither exes nor friends, not enemies nor lovers. We exist in a relational space reserved, it seems, only for we two. This cannot be the case, of course, in a world so vast and full of humanity. But there is an aloneness to this endeavor; a feeling of exploration, discovery. Of being the first.

We are in love, and truly, and deeply. Fixed. Our original foundation, amidst the destruction of everything else, has remained. We were surprised when we realized:  we fell apart as a unit, then as individuals, but we never fell out of love.

How now do we navigate? We are without guides. There is no trail blazed for us. Each move toward each other feels precarious. Every decision about our relationship a risk.

Whenever I tell a friend to ditch a partner who’s fucking with her, I get a little lecture on how relationships are difficult. These are funny little lectures, but they are not wrong. We all have different paths we want to navigate, directions we’d prefer to go. Some have their traditional bumps in the road, I’m in uncharted territory. We can agree to disagree about such deeply personal things, I hope, even as we question each other.

All I really know is that this is a direction I want to go, and this is a person with whom I love to travel.