“So as a neurology nurse,” Finbar said, “what’s one thing you’ll never do?”

Nobody had ever asked me that question. “Ride a bike without a helmet,” I said. “Or take cocaine.”

This was last June at a bar in Burlington, Vt., where I was in nurse practitioner school, and Finbar was — well, I wasn’t sure exactly what he was doing. We met that night through mutual friends. Around 11 p.m., when the group decided to call it a night, I said to him, “I’m going to grab some pizza at the place near my apartment. Want to come?”

“Sure!” he said.

We bought two slices and sat on the windowsill of a restaurant that was closed for the night. The humid air settled on our skin as Finbar told me about the sailing trip he was preparing to leave for at the end of the summer. He asked me how to medically prepare himself.

“Do you know the symptoms of appendicitis?” I said.

“No, what should I look out for?”

“Fever,” I said. “Pain that starts generally in your abdomen and then localizes to the lower right quadrant.”

“And what happens if I develop appendicitis but can’t get to land for two weeks?”

I took a bite of pizza. “You’ll slowly but surely die of sepsis.”

Finbar said he couldn’t eat any more pizza; his mouth was too dry. Thinking that my scary medical advice was the cause, I assured him he would be fine and the chances of him suddenly developing appendicitis were slim but that maybe he should bring some antibiotics, just to be safe. Then I said I was heading home.

“Want me to walk you?”

“No, that’s OK, thanks. I just live around the block.”

Days later, Finbar told me that he thought we were about to have a one-night stand and that’s why his mouth had been dry; he was nervous.

I laughed. “What on earth made you think we were going to hook up?”

“Because you said, ‘The pizza place near my apartment.’ I thought you were inviting me back to your place.”

“Oh, I see. But I wasn’t.”

Finbar was a quirky mid-20s guy who lived on a sailboat and kept asking me to hang out, and I kept saying yes. I can’t say what exactly drew me in. Maybe it was the way he referred to his boat as “a safe space for emotions.” Maybe it was that he went to play Irish music every Wednesday evening and referred to his best friend Rob as his soul mate. He was not at all suave yet so easy to be around.

One Saturday evening he texted, “You want to hang out tonight?”

“Yes,” I replied.

He picked up frozen pizzas and we took our seats on opposite sides of the couch with a dog between us and turned on a movie that had gotten 2.7 on Rotten Tomatoes. As the movie ended and a commercial began, the dog jumped off the couch to stretch and Finbar and I began to talk about the pharmaceutical ad that was on.

“I actually use drug commercials to help learn medications for exams,” I said.

“What’s the coolest medication name you know?” he asked.

I thought for a second. “I guess carbidopa-levodopa is a fun one to say.”

“What does that do?”

“Levodopa is the precursor to dopamine, and carbidopa helps it cross the blood-brain barrier.”

At that, Finbar leaned in and kissed me. His kiss was slow and soft, wanting and intentional. When we pulled away, he smiled and said, “How’s that for dopamine?”

Maybe he was more suave than I had given him credit for.

We kept seeing each other. I wasn’t entirely sure where my feelings lay, but as I watched him dive off the boat one evening, his back muscles reflecting sunlight as they hit the water, a wave of attraction washed over me.

Later that evening, we went below deck and fooled around. After, he made us pasta with pesto and put on the reality TV dating show “Too Hot to Handle,” which would become our show that summer.

As a person who has spent most of my dating life in relationships with men who were older than me, I was surprised to be dating a guy four years younger. But knowing he was leaving for his sailing trip allowed me to open myself up to this experience.

The next five weeks passed in a haze of evenings spent on the water and in showers for two. We ate at the city’s new poutine restaurant that had no air conditioning and sweated through our shirts as we devoured gravy covered fries. We sat five feet across from each other in my apartment as I unsuccessfully tried to land popcorn in his mouth. We watched a lot of “Too Hot to Handle.”

One night he rowed me back to shore after we had been sailing and sang “We’re on a dinghy” to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” the entire way. At my place one morning, he shouted to me from the bathroom, “Is it OK if I poop in your toilet?”

“Go for it!” I hollered back.

Moments like this made me adore Finbar. I loved his heart, his ability to show up for every moment exactly as he was. It made me want to do the same.

In the midst of all this, I went to Vancouver, and he helped sail a boat to Panama. When he got back, we reunited after his weekly Irish music session and picked up right where we left off, knowing that in a month he was going to set sail. His time frame for this trip was “six months to two years.”

It was the same haze as before, but with a deeper sense of knowing each other. He talked to me about the death of his father. I cried telling him about my heartbreak from the year before. We held each other as we chatted late into the night. We both knew it was fleeting and that made us less inhibited, as if whatever was said between us would be moot the moment his boat left Lake Champlain.

I dated a lot of people in my 20s. Most of those relationships fizzled, some ended in heartbreak. But having a lover go off to sea was a new one, and the clichéd theatricality of it was not lost on me.

The summer ended in a blur of him preparing to leave and me starting another semester. The night we said goodbye was after his going-away party; in the morning he would set sail. He was tipsy and excited, and we were all a little underdressed for the cold September evening. By 9:30 p.m., most of the guests had left. I realized it was time to go and whispered to him, “Walk me to my car?”

We held hands in the lamp-lit parking lot, wind blowing off the lake. “I’ve learned so much from you,” he said.

I leaned into him, not wanting to lose this, not ready to drive away. We had no plans to meet up when he was back from his adventure, whenever that might be, so this was goodbye. He gave me one last kiss and said, “You’re going to have a great life.”

“You are too,” I said, my eyes spilling tears. I squeezed his hand as I got into my car.

The next day he set sail, journeying through the Champlain Canal system to the Hudson River and eventually to the Atlantic Ocean. I know from blog posts that he made it to the Caribbean. Where he goes next, I don’t know. I’m not sure he does either.

Finbar remains in my thoughts the way a favorite song does, lyrics popping up at random. I smile wide when I think of him singing to me on the dinghy. I read his blog posts and laugh out loud at his one-liners. I remember the taste of the poutine we ate and his beautiful ability to just be.

And because of my time with him, I’m trying to do the same. To not have the end goal of every romantic encounter be a long-term relationship, a future, a person to build a life with. That expectation can be so smothering of life, of possibility, of even really getting to know someone or having them get to know you. Want to experience the beauty that can come from letting go of expectations? Date someone who’s leaving.

I don’t know when or even if I’ll see Finbar again. I just know that for one summer, we found a haven within each other, a romance on the same water that eventually led us on different journeys.

Sarah Bevet is a nurse in Burlington, Vt.

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