We entered a blindingly heavy rain somewhere in Tennessee. I drove until Birmingham, where we ate dinner at a Mellow Mushroom, and then started driving again.

If all went well, we figured, we would be able to resume travel in a few months, using the couple thousand dollars raised by the GoFundMe we'd set up. I was devastated to be returning to Schenectady, and really worried about Tara, but also grateful to have been able to go on adventures every single day with the person I loved for a quarter of a year and to have made so many new friends along the way. Traveling without money was possible and fun and exciting, but it was also a struggle. We were suddenly arguing a lot, though, including a particularly stupid fight that she escalated into one of the worst conflicts of our entire relationship. Truthfully, I was feeling pretty exhausted from the trip and living in a car, too, so I didn't hold it against her. I assumed it was just because she was feeling so sick. From that day, Tara's attitude seemed to shift, her patience became shorter, and her tolerance for the harsh conditions of that part of the south shrunk to zero. Of course, I had promised her to never speak ill of her mother ever again, so I just stayed quiet as she expressed her feelings about it and attempted to make excuses for her mother. It was very confusing, but further proved my suspicions that her mother was a little off, and a compulsive, manipulative liar.

He didn't even know that she had left town, let alone been living in a car and traveling the country for over three months. While riding bikes in a park in New Orleans a few days earlier, she had received a call from her stepfather, who she'd find out had no idea where she was. It didn't help that her mother was demanding she come back every day. She seemed to be getting gradually sicker with each day, incapable of digesting or absorbing food of any kind and rapidly losing weight.

Tara's health was continuing to fluctuate in troubling ways.

Everyone piano just give me a reason