Once, while staying with a friend at a little-known queer haven in Mexico, I was on the beach watching my friend surf when three Mexican women approached and asked if they could join me. Travelling to unknown places had sharpened my intuition, and something told me I could trust these women. As the sun began to set, one of them lit a stick of palo santo, and she and I talked about the feeling of falling in love: how it made us cautious, how we were both suspicious of any feeling that’s unpredictable and causes us to lose control. As we compared our Virgo traits, we learned that we had the exact same birthday. The discovery made us laugh. Dusk descended, and the women invited me to celebrate the new moon with them in a nearby mountain town. Not wanting to miss out on this one-of-a-kind experience, I didn’t think twice about hitching a ride with a group of construction workers on their way to a job, sitting in the flatbed with some of the men and their equipment. They dropped me off in the town, where the Mexican elders (who I suspected were a lesbian couple) had gathered with a dozen other women and femmes around my age. We talked about how not to lose oneself while giving and receiving love and how to keep our sense of self intact while opening ourselves up to the possibility of love. I marvelled at the sheer longevity of this battle, how it united us across age and geography.