Lawson Hole was every bit as beautiful as I remembered it. The snow melt every year feeds the river, making it run wild across the rocks in the gorge nestled between the mountains. I don't suppose I would be considered much of a romantic guy, but I think I did a pretty good job picking this place out for our picnic. Ashley had been lost in thought but the hiss of the brakes snapped her back to reality. "You have to use the bathroom or something?" I smiled across the truck at her. "Nope." She looked confused. "Why are we stopping here?" My smile grew bigger. "It's a surprise. Hop out and help me with something from the trailer."

I half expected that Ashley would pull away from my touch. I could see how devastated she was when she got in the truck, and I had no way to gauge her reaction since this was our first fight. As it turned out, I got no reaction at all. She didn’t pull away, nor did she lean to me in a sign of acceptance of my outreach to her. She just lay there motionless, leaving the whole weight of remedying the situation squarely upon my shoulders. If this situation were to be resolved amicably, I would have to find the way. While I didn’t like this new selfish side of her that I was seeing for the very first time, I felt genuinely bad that we were at this place. All of the closeness between us had vanished. For years now we had been as one. We awoke together, dined together, and slept together. Now all of the sudden, we were a thousand miles apart. Couldn’t she just reach out to me? Shouldn’t she apologize for just assuming that I would even want a baby around? She had caused this disruption, so why should I be reaching out to her?

When Ashley and I first embarked on our journey together, I suspected that in short order I would get tired of her company. I wasn’t being pessimistic, but I had always been on my own to a large degree. Growing up, my school schedule was in a bit of a conflict with my mother’s work schedule. She was often sitting at the desk naked applying makeup when I got home from school, getting ready to go out on another nights work. And while she would stop in and check on me from time to time, I typically wouldn’t see her until the next day when I got home. After leaving the house, I had been by myself in college, and I had been trucking solo ever since.The thoughts of my impending boredom with my new reality didn’t surface much after my initial assertion. They would occasionally cross my mind only when the seasons would change, or something else would bring to the forefront the amount of time that had passed since we met.