What Happened in Reykjavik – Part 1

This story is fiction, written as a first-person confession.

I’ve never told anyone about Iceland.

Not my sister. Not my best friend, Dana, who tells me everything, including things I really don’t need to know. Not my therapist, who I pay specifically to tell things to.

I’m telling you because you don’t know me, and because I just saw his name on a list of speakers at a conference in Chicago next month, and I haven’t been able to sleep since.

So. Here it is.

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Two years ago, my fiancé left me three weeks before the wedding. I won’t talk about him. He doesn’t deserve the word count.

I’m an accountant. I like spreadsheets. When something goes wrong in my life, I make a plan. So I made a plan: eight days in Iceland, alone, in February, to see the northern lights. I had a spreadsheet. Hotels. Tours. A budget down to the last coffee.

And a rule. Written at the top of the spreadsheet in bold.

NO MEN.

I broke it on day three.

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The tour was a small group, eight of us, in a big jeep with huge tyres, driving out into the dark lava fields to chase the aurora. The guide was a tall, quiet Icelandic man with a red beard and a wool sweater with a pattern of reindeer on it. His name was Gunnar. He told us, very seriously, that the northern lights were the spirits of dead children playing football with a walrus skull.

Everyone laughed. He didn’t.

“That’s actually the story,” he said. “Icelandic people are very strange.”

I liked him immediately. That was the first problem.

The second problem was that, at 11 p.m., in the middle of a frozen nowhere, the jeep broke down.

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He tried for an hour. Everyone else got cold and grumpy and called the tour company. A rescue minibus came at 1 a.m. and took the other seven back to Reykjavik.

There was only room for seven.

I don’t know why I said I’d wait with him. I told myself it was because I felt sorry for him, alone with a broken jeep in minus twelve. I told myself it was the polite thing. I’m an accountant. I can lie to myself in very convincing ways.

We sat in the dead jeep with blankets over our knees and a flask of terrible coffee, waiting for the tow truck, which was two hours away.

And then the sky caught fire.

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I can’t describe it properly. Nobody can. Green, first, a thin ribbon across the stars. Then it got wider, and brighter, and started to move, pulsing and rippling like a curtain in the wind. Then pink at the edges. Then purple. The whole sky, from one side to the other, alive.

I got out of the jeep. I stood on the frozen lava in my rented snow boots and cried. I hadn’t cried once since the wedding was cancelled. Not once. I stood under the northern lights and cried like a child.

Gunnar came and stood beside me. He didn’t say anything. He just put his big wool arm around my shoulders and stood there with me, while the spirits of dead children played football over our heads.

“You’re very sad,” he said eventually.

“I was supposed to be married,” I said. “Two weeks ago.”

He was quiet for a long moment.

“Then I am very glad,” he said seriously, “that you are here instead.”

I laughed through the tears. I couldn’t help it. He looked so solemn.

And then I kissed him.

I want to be clear about that, because Dana will ask. I kissed him. Me. The woman with the spreadsheet and the bold rule at the top. Under the northern lights, in minus twelve, with snot frozen on my face.

He kissed me back like he had been waiting for it.

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The tow truck came at three. Gunnar drove me back to Reykjavik in the truck’s cab, holding my hand on the gearstick the whole way. At my hotel, he walked me to the door.

“I have the next five days off,” he said. “The jeep will be broken for a week.”

“That’s convenient.”

“It is very convenient,” he agreed. “I could show you Iceland. Not the tour. The real one.”

I thought about the spreadsheet. About the bold rule. About every careful, sensible choice I had made in thirty years, and where they had got me.

“Pick me up at nine,” I said.

---

He showed me everything.

A hot spring in the middle of nowhere, steaming in the snow, where we sat up to our necks in warm water while snowflakes melted in our hair. A black sand beach with waves taller than houses and an old crashed plane rusting on the sand. A tiny fishing village where his grandmother lived, who fed me dried fish and asked him something in Icelandic that made him go bright red.

“What did she say?” I asked.

“She asked,” Gunnar said, “why I have never brought a woman home before.”

I stayed with him in a small wooden cabin by a frozen lake for the last three nights. What happened in that cabin belongs only to us, and I’m not going to write it here, partly because Dana might somehow find this, and partly because some things are too good to share. I’ll say this: there was a wood stove, and a lot of snow, and every night the northern lights came back, and we watched them through the window, and I stopped thinking about spreadsheets entirely.

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On the last morning, at the airport, he gave me a small, flat, grey stone.

“From the black beach,” he said. “So you remember.”

“I won’t forget.”

“People always say that,” he said, and smiled, but his eyes were sad.

I didn’t give him my number. I want to be honest about that. I was scared. I thought it was a holiday thing. I thought if I tried to make it real, it would break, like everything else had. I went back to Chicago. I went back to my spreadsheets. I put the stone on my desk.

That was two years ago.

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Last week, Dana sent me a list of speakers for a tourism conference she’s organising. She thought I’d find it funny, because I’d once been to Iceland.

Third name from the bottom.

Gunnar Sigurdsson, Founder, Real Iceland Tours. “Why Tourists Should Get Lost.”

He’ll be in Chicago in four weeks. I checked. Four weeks and two days.

The stone is in my hand while I write this.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m an accountant. I always know what I’m going to do. I don’t know this time.

But I’ve opened a new spreadsheet. There’s only one line in it, at the top, in bold.

GO.

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Next: Part 2, Chicago. Four weeks later, Mia walks into the conference hall.