The first thing I noticed about him was his stillness. In a world that vibrated with perpetual haste, Eli moved like a cartographer drawing a careful new line on a well-worn map. He was deliberate. I called him Salted Caramel Toffee almost from the beginning. His presence was a complex mix of the earthy and the sweet, the grit and the smooth, a flavor that promised depth and rewarded patience.
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We met in the hushed, dusty sanctuary of the city’s central library. I was hiding from a lukewarm latte and a lukewarm date that had just concluded. He was two tables over, surrounded by a constellation of open atlases, his finger tracing a path across a page with a reverence most people reserve for holy texts. He wasn’t just looking; he was reading the land, the contours of the mountains, the spiderweb threads of rivers.
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His home was in the Rose Estate, a sprawling complex of public housing on the city’s edge. Most people, when they heard that, would conjure images of limitation, of dreams deferred. But not Eli. For him, the Estate was his base camp, his port of embarkation. His small apartment was a command center for a life of imagined journeys. Maps were pinned to every wall—vintage topographic surveys, faded road maps from dead countries, satellite images of deltas and deserts. The world wasn't a place he longed for from a distance; it was a place he was already intimately acquainted with, room by room, continent by continent.
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“It’s not about the places everyone goes,” he explained to me on our third date, his voice a low, warm hum that seemed to quiet the air around us. We were sitting on his floor, sharing a block of actual salted caramel toffee. “It’s not about Paris or Fiji or seeing the Eiffel Tower. That’s just… tourism. That’s consuming a place.”
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“What is it about, then?” I asked, genuinely curious, my shoulder brushing against his as I leaned in to look at a map of the Mekong River Delta spread between us.
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He turned to me, and his eyes, the colour of dark earth, were alight with a fervent, gentle passion. “It’s about bearing witness. It’s about understanding how the world works. I want to go to the developing nations, the post-communist states, the places in transition. I want to sit in a dusty square in a town that doesn’t exist on any tourist map and just… watch. Watch poverty. Watch resilience. Watch people build a life on a foundation that everyone else tells them is shaky.”
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The way he said it wasn’t voyeuristic or cold. It was anthropological, poetic even. He spoke of poverty not as a misery to be gawked at, but as a human condition to be understood, a stark and powerful landscape of the spirit. He wanted to see the raw, unvarnished truth of the world, to feel its tectonic plates grinding together, and he wanted me to see it with him.
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“I want a relationship that goes somewhere,” he said another time, his hand finding mine. His fingers were calloused from his day job fixing bicycles, a practical skill that funded his cartographic obsession. “Not just on a map. I mean, really goes somewhere. Grows. Evolves. I don’t want to just be with someone. I want to journey with them.”
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I was captivated. He was the man of my dreams because I hadn’t known it was possible to dream in such dimensions. My own life—my job in graphic design, my cozy apartment with its potted plants, my weekends spent at brunch or the cinema—suddenly felt monochrome, safe, and unbearably small. Eli was a splash of vibrant, challenging colour. He didn’t just want to love me; he wanted to take me on an expedition into the heart of the world, and into the heart of what we could be together.
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The planning became our shared language. Evenings were spent cross-legged on his map-strewn floor, a single lamp casting a pool of golden light over our dreams. We weren’t planning a vacation; we were plotting an odyssey.
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“Look,” he’d say, his finger landing on a speck in Central Asia. “Kyrgyzstan. The Pamir Highway. One of the highest roads in the world. The Soviets built it, then left. Now it’s just… there. A concrete scar on these incredible mountains. We could take a shared taxi, the kind that breaks down every hundred kilometers. We’d stay in yurts with families who’ve never heard of our world.”
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He painted pictures with his words so vivid I could almost feel the thin, cold air and taste the salty fermented mare’s milk he described. We pored over visa requirements for countries whose names sounded like poetry: Belarus, Uzbekistan, Moldova. He taught me how to read a topographic map, to see the story of the land in the spacing of its contour lines. I fell in love with the man and his mission simultaneously. To be with Eli was to be enrolled in the greatest adventure of my life.
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I threw myself into the preparations with a convert’s zeal. I got all the necessary shots, my arm aching for days. I bought a backpack that looked comically large in my tidy bedroom. I practiced tying a scarf a dozen different ways, as he said it was the most versatile item a traveler could own. I tried to share his excitement, and mostly, I did. But sometimes, in the quiet of the night, a small, timid voice inside me would whisper. It whispered that the yurts sounded cold, that shared taxis that broke down sounded frightening, that watching poverty felt less like a privilege and more like an intrusion.
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I silenced the voice. This was Eli. This was real. This was a relationship that was going somewhere.
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Our launch point, our first foray into the world beyond the maps, was a trip to Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was, he said, a perfect starter—European enough to not be a total shock, but Balkan enough to be complex, layered with the recent and raw history of war and renewal.
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For the first few days, it was magic. We walked the cobbled streets of Sarajevo, and he showed me not just the beautiful old mosques and churches, but the Sarajevo Roses—mortar blast scars in the concrete filled with red resin. He showed me where the snipers had perched in the hills. He didn’t do it morbidly; he did it with the sober respect of a historian, ensuring the story was remembered. We took a rattling bus into the countryside, and he was in his element, talking to locals with a dog-eared phrasebook and a lot of hand gestures, his face lit with an incandescent joy.
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But then, the pace began to tell on me. Eli was inexhaustible. He wanted to be moving, always moving. A seven-hour bus ride to a shell-cratered fortress was a thrilling prospect to him; to me, it was a seven-hour ordeal of discomfort. He wanted to eat only at tiny, smoky burek stands where no one spoke English; I secretly longed for a quiet coffee shop where I could just sit and process it all.
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The crack appeared on a hot, dusty day in Mostar. We were watching the famous divers leap from the Stari Most bridge. It was a stunning, visceral spectacle. Eli was mesmerized, his artist’s soul captivated by the arc of the human body against the sky, the risk, the tradition.
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I, however, was overwhelmed. The crowds, the unrelenting sun, the weeks of constant movement, the emotional weight of the history we were steeped in—it all coalesced into a wave of pure exhaustion. All I could think was that I wanted to find a patch of shade, sit down, and drink a bottle of cold water without being jostled.
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“Isn’t it incredible?” Eli breathed, his eyes shining. “The sheer will it takes to do that, day after day.”
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“It is,” I said, and my voice sounded thin and reedy to my own ears. “I’m just… really tired, Eli. Could we maybe find somewhere to sit down for a bit?”
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He turned to look at me, and for the first time, I saw a flicker of something in his eyes that wasn’t admiration or shared passion. It was confusion. Then, a hint of disappointment.
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“Tired?” he said, as if he’d never heard the word before. “This is it. This is the moment. This is living.”
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“I know,” I said, forcing a smile. “I just need a minute.”
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We found a low wall. I sat. He stood beside me, his energy suddenly contained, restless. The silence between us was no longer the comfortable, mapping-our-dreams silence of his apartment. It was a chasm opening up.
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“You don’t really see it, do you?” he said finally. His voice was quiet, but it carried a devastating weight.
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“See what?”
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“The point. Of all of this.” He gestured not just at the bridge and the divers, but at the entire country, the entire trip, the entire future we had planned. “It’s not a checklist. It’s a feeling. It’s about being fully, utterly present in a moment that is completely unlike any other moment you will ever have.”
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“I am present,” I protested, but it was a lie. I was present in my aching feet and my swirling head.
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“No,” he said softly, with a finality that chilled me despite the heat. “You’re enduring it. You’re waiting for it to be over so you can go home to your quiet life and your plants. This… this is my home. The movement, the uncertainty. This is where I’m alive.”
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He saw me. He saw the part of me I had been trying to hide, the part that found profound beauty in a quiet evening, in routine, in safety. The part he called “boring.”
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The rest of the trip was a funeral march. The magic was gone. Every bus ride, every new town, was just another piece of evidence in the trial he was holding in his head. I had failed the audition for the role of his lifelong travel partner. I was not the woman who could watch poverty with him; I was the woman who got tired and wanted to sit down.
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The end came at the bus station in Sarajevo, where it had all begun. We were supposed to travel together to our next destination, a remote town in the mountains he’d been desperate to see.
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He stood with his backpack on, a map of the region folded in his hand. I looked at him, my Salted Caramel Toffee, my man of dreams, and saw a stranger.
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“I’m going to go on alone,” he said. His voice wasn’t cruel. It was resolute. It was the voice of a man consulting his internal compass and following its true north, no matter what lay in the path.
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“What? Eli, no. We can… we can slow down. We can do what you want to do.”
“That’s just it,” he said, his earth-dark eyes full of a pity that was worse than anger. “You saying that proves you don’t understand. This isn’t a negotiation with the world. The world doesn’t slow down for you. You have to keep up with it. Or you get left behind.”
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He hoisted his pack. “You’re a wonderful person,” he said. And he meant it. “But you belong in a garden. Tended, peaceful, beautiful. I belong on the road. I need a fellow traveler, not a passenger.”
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And with that, he turned and walked towards the bus, the one that would take him deeper into the heart of his dream. He didn’t look back. He just moved forward, as deliberate and sure as he had been that first day in the library, tracing a path only he could see.
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I stood there in the chaotic, dusty station, surrounded by the cacophony of foreign words and departing buses, and felt the most profound silence of my life. He had left me on the trip. He had reached a point on his map where our paths diverged irrevocably, and he had chosen his without a second glance.
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It took me a long time to get home. A long time to stop seeing his face in every map, to stop tasting the bitter aftertaste of salted caramel. He had wanted a relationship that went somewhere, and in the end, it had. It had gone to a bus station in Sarajevo, and it had ended there.
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Sometimes, I wonder where he is. I picture him in a yurt in Mongolia, or on a broken-down train in Siberia, his face turned to the window, reading the landscape like a story he can’t wait to finish. And I am here, in my garden, among my tended plants. It is quiet. It is peaceful. It is, I have come to understand, not a place of limitation, but a different kind of world altogether. He was the man of my dreams, but I was not the woman for his journey. And perhaps, that was the only true destination we were ever meant to reach.
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and then Add to home screen.