Geneva showed up at my house in March of 2013 in a rented car with a half-empty bag of trail mix, a big duffel bag full of clothes, and the cutest face on Earth. I didn’t know at the time that it was what the next few years of my life would look like: me and her, slightly disheveled, heading somewhere in a car we didn’t belong in. I didn’t know at the time that being in love with Geneva was like being on an open road.

I flew on an airplane for the first time at 19, during the winter I was convinced I’d broken my life into pieces. I was going to a conference with a group from my school, but I requested to fly separately, hoping the alone time would do me well. I had the luck of being assigned a window seat. I asked the man next to me to help me buckle my seatbelt. I ate snack bags of pretzels and drank cups of free soda for lunch and dinner.

I cried every time the plane landed, wishing the flight was longer. I was struck by how beautiful it was to watch things so huge become tiny and the idea that anything could easily disappear if you only approached the right height.

I was bewildered by airports and their huge glass walls. San Diego’s airport had what felt like an entire room made of glass attached to it, where people were waiting for something and I was walking mindlessly in front of them staring outside. I marveled at the palm trees and I shed my coat and stepped outside and it was warm, and there was a breeze, and everything inside of me melted – all of the weeks I’d spent eating apples for dinner or running away from everyone in the library and even the trip, even the tears from the plane, everything melted out into a puddle and I stepped over it while I walked toward the shuttle to my hotel.

We all shared a room with a balcony. I spent every day and night of that trip on the balcony or across the street watching the water move.

I called my mother just once while I was there, to let her know I wasn’t coming back. “If I miss my flight, I can’t afford another, and I’ll be stuck,” I told her. “And I kind of think I would like that.” I wished on the shuttle back to the airport that I was the kind of person who would ever do something that stupid just because it felt good.

While Geneva was in my city, she drove me everywhere. I felt alive with the power of getting places. The place I called home changed forever when I saw it from the passenger’s seat. I don’t have a license and I had never been the one making decisions about where cars were going. I was the person who went along on the tedious shopping trips or got picked up by her friends at metro stops on their way home from work. I was the person who sometimes made decisions about when and where she was going based on how much the tickets cost.

I took her to all my favorite places and she never complained when I made us late by changing at the last minute or signed her up to drive my friends around after a night out. I got us lost and I always announced turns at the last minute and I never told the truth about how easy it was to park and I would start apologizing or go quiet and wait for her to get angry but instead she’d just laugh or turn around or drive around the block five more times.

It was a stream of good with no bad. It was, I imagined, what all the stable and loved people in the world must feel like.

On the last weekend she was in town we drove to New York City. We made out in an industrial park once we crossed the border into New Jersey. We spent hours on end in the small car together and we had known each other for what could have been seconds and I would kiss her cheek when the car slowed to a stop and run my fingers through her hair to stretch the minutes. She stopped at a diner off the side of the highway at 2 AM because she knew it would make me happy, and after a series of unfortunate events we ended up in a trashy motel in Staten Island. The carpet was mysteriously damp and the lobby had bulletproof glass and all I had was a tiny overnighter filled with shirts and shorts. Somewhere inside of me, a small ball of anxiety would normally be forming and shouting at me to cry, or freak out, or be scared, or be frustrated. But I wasn’t.

I was with Geneva, so I was home.

My favorite part of family vacations was always the car ride. We never flew or took trains or buses. My mom loved driving. She used to embark on journeys long and short from the driver’s seat, each time dividing her sedan into compartments: her in the driver’s seat, me in the back with my tiny legs stretched out to the other window, and my brother Rocky in front with the seat almost all the way down.

I used to pack for those vacations meticulously, each time picking a different oversized tote bag to stuff with books, crayons, GameBoys, photos, postcards, a journal, sunglasses, hats. I planned every second of every drive, hoping I would be able to stay awake and stare out the window. I loved the getting there, the maps, the pit stops, the small podunk towns you drove through to get to the main attractions. The best part is always the journey.

Virginia looked different than DC, even just a few miles out. Sometimes, the highway was shaded by tall trees that bent over, forming a sort of makeshift tunnel for miles. Occasionally we veered into a lookout point and clamored out of the car. I couldn’t stop taking photos of it, of the rocks and the water that I’d never realized was right outside of the place I’d lived for six years.

We drove to West Virginia to pick flowers the day after my 23rd birthday. We stopped at small country stores to scout for trinkets and bought a picnic’s worth of food at a grocery store that we ate at a national park. We picked a ton of flowers in a small patch next to a massive farm, pink and yellow and bright green. We stuffed them into the cups of melted ice from our road trip drinks we’d had earlier, dropping them after in either cup holder in the back of the car. We stopped at Target to buy a big vase for them, and they stayed tall and proud until Geneva left town a few days later.

We tried on the trip back to stop at an overlook point that had a perfect view of the water, but we missed all the outlet roads and couldn’t figure out how to turn around. We pushed on instead, knowing if we really loved it enough we’d make it back one more time to acknowledge it.

Gifts aren’t my strong suit, so I got her a book that Christmas at Urban Outfitters where you filled in the reasons you love someone. “Nobody can top me like you can,” I wrote inside. On another page, I told her, “I would go anywhere with you.” I flew to Vancouver right after the holiday to stay in her basement apartment, where we took turns making each other coffee in the morning and decorated a tiny pink tinsel tree with champagne corks and scraps of garland.

Geneva knew exactly what to get me for Christmas, maybe because of all the long and seemingly meaningless conversations we’d had through all those stretches of road. Geneva and I are always rambling on to each other about anything and everything on our trips, and somewhere in passing she’d been truly listening. Her gift that year was an amalgamation of everything I’d ever said out loud I wanted, even things I’d forgotten or hardly let myself imagine.

She gave me porcelain bowls for my dog Eli, which I’d stubbornly insisted I was about to buy for years, and a Drake chain from eBay, because she’s the one. I opened the card last on her request, a tiny little handmade thing on which she’d drawn one of my favorite fantasies: Eli pulling her and I in a sled. Inside she drew a map, and the next morning she woke me up and we followed it.

We headed first to a ferry, because I like boats, and we ate at a buffet on the way to Vancouver Island because I like those, too, and the room had the best view of the water besides the top deck. Once we docked, she took us to a cottage in tiny town called Honeymoon Bay, where for only one night we built our temporary home. We cooked dinner together, drank champagne in a hot tub, played chess in our robes, and stoked a fire. It felt reclusive there, like nobody would ever find us or could see us lost in the middle of the vastness of that island and that was okay because we had each other.

It should have taken us four hours to get from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, but instead it took nine to ten each way. We rolled the top down and watched the sun set with almost nothing obstructing our views, me applying more sunscreen in the passenger seat while Geneva steadfastly drove us through the desert. We were in a convertible, a mustang that almost disappeared entirely when you rolled the soft leather top down.

The trip was through an unending patch of desert. I’d never seen flat land, or a view with no mountains, and I kept wondering how long it would be until we saw a body of water again on this beautiful, vast, infinite road. Looking out on the highway was impossible, because all you could see was that the land stretched past your eyes and your own conception of what’s possible. Occasionally, we’d stop so I could roll us a joint or light a cigarette, and we’d have to roll the top up or down, which was my job.

I loved that car and the way it felt to be seemingly thrust across roads and highways and bridges and time and space, how it felt to raise my hands and feel no ceilings, how it felt to be a tiny speck in all that sand with nothing but a little bit of shellac between me and where I was going. I’d wanted to be big my entire life, but in that moment I was more than content being the smallest piece of matter in the whole damn place.

“Run away with me.” It was the name of an article Geneva sent me when we first started dating with a photo of an airplane and sentences that each reminded me how easy it could be to leave everything behind. I closed my eyes and saw that world, every piece of it running through my hands. I knew things were different with Geneva when I realized I would give up everything to be with her, just like that. I would turn and run from everything that had ever felt safe or right – and I knew that it would feel good. That it would be like a road trip that never ended.

My mom used to tell my brother and I when we were kids that Colorado was her favorite place. She and her boyfriend used to go to Aspen and Vale to ski and Boulder to watch Coors-sponsored cycling races on the regular, which produced my collection of Coors shirts that I took home from her when I was in college.

I told my mom about Geneva a little before our trip to Denver, and that had really opened things up between us again. For years, everything had been a secret, and I’d been stuck in place trying to make sure the image my mom had of me didn’t get interrupted.

I loved how small and big Denver was all at once. One fake fireplace electric heater kept us warm every night. We drank at local bars and ate lots of green chile sauce and I walked around with Geneva thinking that everywhere we were going, my mom had already been. She’d wanted me to see Colorado since I was a kid, but since she was a single mom she doubted she could drive there and back with two kids without losing her mind or wasting too much time. More than anything, I loved being able to report back to her when I got home about how much I’d loved the wide open spaces and Antique Row and that people in Denver ate bottomless brunch on Mondays. I called her from Denver a few times to tell her about our tour of the Coors factory or how amazingly hot it got at noon or how delicious the food was and how nice it was to have taken a trip with Eli, who travelled underneath my seat on the plane, and then we would go outside into the crisp air and I would feel so new again, like I had gotten some sort of new lease on life.

I was time zones and thousands of miles away from her, but I was still my mother’s daughter. I never thought I’d feel so close to her so far away from the house I grew up in.

Nanaimo has a floating pub, but we never made it there. Instead, when I visited Geneva on the island we traipsed around in our casual clothes and ran to Tim Horton’s in the car every morning to get coffee. We went to little vintage shops and small diners and walked along the water together, staring out at the boats and grabbing breakfast at the floating restaurants. Everything in Nanaimo moves slow, which felt amazing after having worked at my job in the non-profit sector for a year. The Supreme Court was laying down rulings and I was sitting on a balcony staring out at the Pacific Ocean in my sandals. I started wondering why the rest of the world tried to move so fast it killed them.

I packed a temporary tattoo and put it on as if it were real and I was someone else completely. After all, nobody knew me there.

Fittingly enough, Geneva and I told each other for the first time that we loved each other in a rented car. It was my second-ever trip to Los Angeles, which came after my fifth-ever flight on an airplane. It was the trip where I’d listening to “Banshee Beat” by Animal Collective over and over again on the plane and on the transit bus I took to BWI. It reminded me of the scene in The Go-Getter where he steals the car and drives out into the woods. I was starting to become more certain that one day I was gonna get a chance at something big, take it, and fucking run for my life.

Geneva, who had rebooked my A-Camp flights so we could explore the city, met me at my terminal and drove us to the small place we rented right off of Hollywood Boulevard. That first night, we went to a little Mexican place up the street with one of our mutual friends and she got so fucked up that she ended up sleeping on the couch in our one-room, studio apartment – right at the foot of our bed.

We snuck out under the guise of getting booze and I told Geneva to get in the car in the parking lot. She listened to me, and then we sat in silence in the two front seats. I looked over at her and she was fidgeting, which she doesn’t really do. I kept opening my mouth but nothing was coming out.

“I love you,” she told me, and all the air in my body escaped.

I leaned over the armrest to hug her tighter than ever before. “I love you too,” I blurted out. “So much.”

The next time we came back, we stayed in the same apartment building and ate at the same restaurant.

Lately I daydream about running away. There’s an urge inside of me to run. I battle it at the grocery store, in train stations, in my dreams. I count down days, I pack bags for nowhere, I buy things for the future, I make plans that I know might never happen but that feel so good on the tip of my tongue. I satiate my wanderlust with Skype sessions and vacations to see the person I’m in love with, forgetting each time that eventually I will have to board a flight away from what we’ve built.

I sit staring out the window on Metro trains and buses and in my office and in my bedroom, sometimes tearfully, saying goodbye. I loved living here so much, I rehearse to my heart. Or I go shopping, and I command myself to buy the light dresses and the gold rings, and even though I know they’re out-of-character for the character I am now, I stock them up for my trips where I can become someone else. I purge my things – I go through suitcases and boxes and reusable shopping bags full of the stuff I’ve hoarded for a lifetime and I leverage with myself that I have to let it go if I ever want to go myself. You can’t fit a new life in a carry-on when you’re bringing all the old stuff, too.

But mostly, I see visions.

Sometimes, I’m riding shotgun in a convertible with her and Eli’s in the backseat with his tongue out and it’s sunny, but not too hot, and the radio is playing all of my favorite songs, and I look over and my stomach flips from excitement and I kiss her cheek. Sometimes, we’re just leaving, packing up the snacks and the supplies. Sometimes, it’s just a feeling or a tiny speck of a moment – the limitlessness of the open road, the emptiness of uncertainty, the strange but exciting terror at knowing nothing is ever going to be the same. I feel like I’ve gone through these motions over and over again in my brain, mostly to enlist my entire body into the ongoing escapist fantasy that has become my entire waking life.

One day, all I want to worry about is which city we’re going to next.

When Geneva and I were driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in a rented convertible, I saw an entire cloud floating next to the highway in the sky over the desert. I could see it spanning what looked like the whole of the sky to the right of us, almost touching my shoulder. I watched it graze the universe on top and I saw rain pouring out of it in the distance and somewhere in the middle, there was a lightning bolt like a heartbeat.

I could have fit my entire life in that cloud. My entire fucked-up, tiny, timid life.

It only took us five minutes to drive past it.

I’ve found that being in a long-distance relationship doesn’t feel the way it’s supposed to feel, or at least not the way people think it does. When I talk about Geneva or write about us, people are quick to share horror stories of distance that tore them apart or share sympathy with me for being, ostensibly, disappointed she doesn’t live in my apartment or my city or my state – or even my country. But that’s not my narrative. That’s not my relationship. I don’t spend a lot of time wallowing in what we don’t have. I don’t wish anything about us was less transportable or mobile or everchanging.

Geneva showed up at my house in March of 2013 and nothing was the same, not ever again, not at all. She taught me I didn’t have to go home again, that maybe home really was wherever you were sitting to have a drink, that I could run faster than I ever would have imagined, that anyone is capable of escaping. Being in a long-distance relationship with Geneva means that the entire world belongs to us, that we can leave our mark and our memory in any state or province, that we can pick more flowers and see more blue skies than anyone else.

With Geneva, every second we spend together is an adventure. And I really love that.

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