The night before she left she called him, crying. She said she couldn't face the possibility of being apart from him for so long. He came over and they stayed up all night together, lying in her bed, talking and holding each other. He said he didn't understand why she had to go all the way to Halifax, why she couldn't stay and go to a college nearby. But Dalhousie was a good school and she had been offered scholarships.

It was agreed that they would call each other every day and email whenever possible. The months would go by quickly and then they would be together again.

He left her house at seven o'clock the next morning, not caring if his parents knew he had spent the night with her.

A week later she started classes. It was cold and lonely in Halifax, even with phone calls and emails.

She met Derek and Plato in a first-year philosophy class. They showed her that she had been living in a cave all her life, gazing at the shadows on the walls, that what she had known was not real, but an image, a simulation.

She tried to explain all of this to him in an email. That their love was only a simulation, an image of the true thing itself, that it was a boy-girl love, immature, naive. She knew that he wouldn't understand right away, but that he would be grateful one day, when he decided to leave the cave himself. He would be free, just as she was, to choose his own destiny.

He remembered to thank her in the note he left for his parents.