“You know I’ll always love you. You know you’ll live on in my memories of everything we’ve done together.” He promised her this immortality. But couldn’t promise her himself. His eyes were pale blue, the color of a clouded sky when he told her this, and he said it while holding her hands.

“You keep reminding me of my death,” she shot back and jerked her hands away.

“I thought I was reassuring you of my infinite love.”

But never commitment. As though amorphous infinite love is a commitment.

Maybe it is.

And so they tried to unwind. She said, “This Hanukkah, that’ll be it. After New Year’s, Zoe and I are going to Antigua and you and I should move on.”

She bought fifty sunblock and a new black bikini.

He sent her emails telling her he had just made the worst mistake of his life. How many soul mates do you get? How many chances for happiness? He had all the time in the world, she should start dating, and when she found someone else, he would exit. That way he’d have her a little bit longer.

Crazy. Impossible. They were stuck in a love that never became a pledge. Jammed in a relationship whose goal was to tear itself apart.

I heard about this as it unfolded, she told me on her porch, or at my house for dinner, or on one of our long walks.

But Allie is Allie, always excited about so much—the art she does, the clients she sees, politics—that the drama of the situation never threatened to pull her under. So now he spends the night with her a couple of times a week. Whenever they’re together, they’re happy. And she halfheartedly, haphazardly, dates others. Takes swing dancing lessons, and ballroom dance, and works for the Democratic party, goes to Saturday morning physics lectures, and is enthralled by string theory, quarks, the infinite continually expanding universe, the physics of brain function and heart regeneration.

“I used to think that someone who sat on her butt all day listening to people’s problems would be cautious.”

She laughed. We were again on her porch, the blue-jays circling, a hummingbird buzzing at her feeder. “Nope. I learned the reverse. Learned that even doing what you’re supposed to do can go horribly wrong, so you might as well do what your authentic self wants.”

I nodded and sighed as I thought about Alex and Sky.

“I do what I want within reasonable limits and my reasonable is pretty broad.”

But the truth is, Allie is an adventurer with a sentimental loving heart who doesn’t really care what people think or how to impress them, and that means freedom.