“What’s this on my head?” I said to Adam feeling two little bumps protruding from the top of my head.

“I don’t know. You want me to put on the headlamp and look?”

“Yeah.”

Adam donned the headlamp and proceeded to comb through my hair with his fingers. “It looks like just a red bump…oh…”

“What?”

“Nothing. I thought it might have been a tick.”

I suppressed the urge to squeal. “A TICK?!”

“It’s not a tick. It’s just red bumps. You probably just have some bug bites.”

Stepping back from this touching scene makes me realize that it was not all that long ago when I finally started admitting to Adam that I do, in fact, on occasion, defecate, and that perhaps at this particular moment in time he may want to steer clear of the bathroom. I spent the first year of our courtship plotting our meetings around my bathroom schedule and sweating over the times when things got thrown out of whack. Now he was picking through my hair like a monkey. This is how things go when you live together which is what we are doing now. Living together. And it’s not the cute kind of living together where we have a loft in The City furnished with kicky Ikea furniture located right down the street from that great independent book store and the coffee house that we go to every Thursday where they have amazing live jazz. No, it’s more like living in a trailer where we have had to pawn almost all of our possessions to pay rent and even after that PG&E has turned off our electricity and the water company is looking at shutting us down as well. But I have to say that living like this and surviving it says much more about us than being able to live “cute.” Living cute is easy. You don’t worry about money, or if there is going to be heat tonight, or how you’re going to wash the dishes without any water. You don’t even have to see each other for days on end. Being able to live “not so cute” is a testament to our relationship. Seeing each other every waking minute would take its toll on most people, especially the kind of people who are used to having a lot of alone time. The idyllic setting helps as does the fact that we are so much alike that we pretty much know where the limits of annoyance are. So far neither one of us has even threatened to do anything like throw the other’s possessions out of the window of the moving vehicle. Adam did say he was going to leave me on the side of the road, but he was just kidding.