On their last night together, twenty-two-year-old Thar Nge and twenty-three-year-old Achit sat arm-in-arm on a hill in southeastern Myanmar’s Kayin state. From the student hall in Chiang Mai where she now lives, Achit recounts that October night: “It was around midnight, and there were so many falling stars out there. The thing is, my boyfriend doesn’t like shooting stars. He’s sad when he sees them. We use ‘shooting stars’ for comrades who have passed.”

Before his untimely death in 2022, the poet Kyi Zaw Aye posed a question in his poem ‘Winter is on its way’: “How can we encounter true love in times of war?” It’s a query with no easy solution, but some couples are trying to find their own answers.

The chaos after Myanmar’s 2021 military coup has kept couples apart through death, exile and imprisonment. The number of people detained on political grounds has soared; Thar Nge is one of the more than 20,000 imprisoned today. It’s not the first time, after the coup, that he and Achit have been forced to part.

• Tags: Amy Webber, Issue 35, Myanmar