I sat in my car and watched as he hopped up the steps of his next door neighbors house, his mother’s. I’m sure, after 9 months of watching a thin heavily tattooed girl with big hair enter her son’s home for about an hour, then leave, she may have wondered who I was. Or maybe not, who knows.

He doesn’t know it, but he’s been the most consistent man in my life this year. I was never honest with him about what I had been doing during the long weeks of our separations, maybe I carry some guilt about that.

A family man, private about the type of relationship he had with me, he gave me an outlet without getting in my head.

We know so little about each other that it came as a shock to him that I was moving, had written a book, had children, had real reasons to keep him at arms length.

I told him, “maybe I’ll see you around, but I’d never subject a man to me in the mental state that I’m in” he thanked me for my honesty.

His tall lean stature, mostly covered in ink, an older version of himself, with heavily salted thick hair, always had a smile on his face. Child like in nature. Why wouldn’t we be smiling, we had no attachments.

One of my favorite things about those encounters were the sunsets I got to watch on my drive home, through the fields by his house. Always like fire in the sky, to remind me that the end of one thing is only the beginning of another.