Star-Crossed

“I just don’t understand why you run away each year,” the tweeting voice of my Mother says from her kitchen in rural Pennsylvania. I can almost smell the burning biscottis she is taking out the oven. I wait a few moments to respond, imagining her phone (still with cord) handing on her shoulder as she swings the hot tray onto the island. 

“I am not running away, I am nurturing my soul,” I say, knowing full well how cringe worthy I sound. Mother isn’t listing anyway and the syllable of her next slew of words overlaps with my last. 

“If you are part of some cult, darling, there is a way out. Betty said her son was hooked on this video game, the one where you shoot people, and he got help.” 

“Call of Duty is not a cult, Mom,” I say, eyes shooting up to see the word DELAY next to flight number 88062 to Reykjavik. 

“This is the fifth year in a row you’ve went to some foreign land for the New Year. You don’t even bring your friends. Is there some guy your father needs to shoot? Not that I encourage shooting. Betty said her son was so corrupted by that cult game-“

“Goodbye Mom,” I say as I get up from my seat in gate E5 and waltz up to the lady behind the desk. Her hair is neatly brushed into a high pony tail that makes her rosy cheeks gaunt, she pretends to not see me. I clear my throat. 

“Two hours?” I say. “I can see the plane.”

“The exit sign isn’t lighting up,” she says, “Airline protocol says all emergency equipment needs to be in working order to take off.”

“Two hours to replace some AAA’s?”

“Airline protocol says-“

“Never mind,” I say, letting my hand that was bracing the counter fall to my thigh with a slap. I roll my luggage back to my seat and sit down and grab my kindle out my backpack. 

Monster In My Bed: A Dark Romance 

With a sigh, I read a few pages on the illuminated plastic screen. Soon the words “King of the Desert Monsters” and “I became his captive” turn to “he is probably thinking I am not coming” and “a few hours could turn into two days, I don’t have that kind of time.”

My nervous system begins to send title waves of anxiety through my limbs, the waters lapping at my fingertips until I am clenching my kindle so hard my knuckles are turning white. Everyone around me is looking at me, wondering what kind of crazy I am.

No they are not, Mandy, they are sleeping or listing to Drake on their headphones. No one cares that you are about to freak out in public. Calm Down. Go grab a donut. 

Frowning, I roll my luggage over to the ridiculous line for Dunkin Donuts. Complete with a worker who looks to be sleep walking through his task of brewing coffee and putting powered donuts into little pink bags. I join the herd. My foot tapping to the sound of the overhead music that is playing jazz as I think about his face.

What does he look like? What does he sound like? Smell like? Taste like? I wonder until I am next in line to order and I am blurting out, “Iced Mocha and Glaze with Sprinkles.” 

Its not a bad order, it’s just not my order. 

I wheel my luggage back to my seat in E5. 

“We will now begin boarding,” the gaunt faced lady says the moment I am done licking the icing off my fingers and slurping at the leftover ice. 

Thanks to my dear old anxiety, I have priority boarding and after the babies in strollers and people in wheelchairs board I go to the tunnel. 

“That wasn’t quite two hours,” I say to the gaunt faced lady. 

She scans my boarding pass and promptly scoots be along with a long eyed expression of “they don’t pay me enough to deal with you.”

 I find my way to my window seat and instantly begin fiddling with the onboard entertainment screen. I settle on watching The Greatest Showman and The Titanic (Not the best movie to watch while enjoying public transportation, I might add) and soon we are landing in a snow covered lane. 

Getting from Reykjavik Airport to the city has become a mindless journey the 5^th time around. My nervous energy is now exhaustion which is good for my poor nerves. I sip on a coffee the price of a bottle of wine in the states and let the shuttle whisk me to my city center hotel. 

An upgrade from the first time I visited Iceland as a 19 year old, freshly graduated romantic hoping to meet the love of her life between geothermal spas and volcano walking tours. Unfortunately for younger Mandy, I did not find a way out of attending community college. However, I didn’t leave quite empty-handed. 

The man at the front desk hands me a hot chocolate chip cookie before giving me my room key for the the next two nights. 

“You are not visiting long? On your way to Europe?”

“Paris,” I say with a soft smile.

“The City of Lights,” he says, his mustache turning up. 

“Thank you,” I quickly say before heading to the elevator. I find my room and scan the card on the door knob before entering. The room is pitch black and I fiddle my hand on the wall until I find the switch. Nothing. 

Leaving my luggage in the hall, I use my phone flash light to search for a lamp. Still Nothing. 

Just my luck, my room has no electricity. 

Taking a deep breath, I go back down the elevator, the cookie in my hand now cold, and ask for a new room. 

“Did you put the card in the slot?”

“The what?”

“The electricity doesn’t turn on until the card is in the slot by the door, its better for the environment.”

“Oh,” I say, face turning red, “That’s awesome that you do that here.”

I think about my awkward response the entire elevator ride back up. This time when I enter my room I insert the card and the room lights up. 

I finally eat my cookie. 

One hour later I am sitting on a bus wearing long underwear. My mousy brown hair is frizzy from travel and my newly applied makeup sits heavy on my tired skin. All I want to do is rub my eyes but I can’t look like a raccoon when I see him. 

If he remembers me. Do I remember him? Can you remember someone if you don’t recall the shape of their nose or the color of their eyes?

The bus is filled with people entering the city for New Years, the sun has long set and adults in sequins and fur coats are getting ready to dance the night away. You can instantly tell who is a tourist and who is a native by the amount of warmth needed to chase the below zero chill away. 

I stare at a girl in a wrapped velvet dress that exposes her long, pale legs from the inch of visibility between my puffer collar and hat. She has a laugh that could warm the halls of death and the man holding her waist drinks it up. I notice he has two jackets on and want to cry, if only I could have been loved like that. 

I’m the last person on the bus after we leave the city stops. The bus circles back to the beginning of its route, ready to pick up more party goers. I get off at the first stop, in the middle of a street full of apartment buildings and one cheap pizza shop. 

I order a slice of pepperoni for the road and begin my trek into the adjacent cluster of birch trees. This is not a place a lone woman usually goes. The pathway is covered in untouched snow. Like the bones that hall it home, the cemetery is buried. 

He lives northward. Near the poplar tree. One, lone, flickering light guide me to wear he rests amongst the frozen ground. Out my backpack, I lay a picnic blanket and place the cold pizza. 

“Hello Louis,”I say, folding myself down onto the blanket. My hand touches his headstone. “It’s so funny, you look the same as you did last year. Do French boys not age?” 

A wisp of a laugh sounds from my lips, chapped from the wind that brings new flurries with every gust. 

“I brought you pizza,” I say. “It’s not the best. The woman who gave it to me looked high. It’s probably a drug front.”

I reach into my bag and pull out the champagne I bought at the hotel bar before hoping on the bus. The cork hits Rebecca Cole’s headstone and so I tip the bottle in her honor before taking the first swig. 

“Cheers,” I say before the second. 

“I miss you,” I say before the third. 

The champagne fizzes up from the bottle and spills down the neck, as if it too is crying for the boy who now sits below the earth. I take another long, hard swig. 

“Can you believe it’s been forty-three thousand, eight hundred hours since we meet?” I tell him, marveling at the sheer expanse of time that now separates us. “And we only knew each other for ten. Yet, we are all each other has tonight.”

I close me eyes and try to remember what Louis looked like when I spotted him coming off the bus, his black hair wind swept as he studied a map of Reykjavik. 

“Looking for fun?” I had asked him with my red stained lip between my teeth. 

“Why? Are you buying?” He had replied in a thick French accent that had me basically eating out the palm of his hand. 

Louis Belchamp was the son of a late real-estate mogul. Yet, this night he told me he was a “lost boy looking for wonderland by the coins in his pocket”. I paid for the first and second round of drinks before a girl came up to him and asked Are You Louis Belchamp?”

“I have been caught,” he told me, before taking my hand so we could escape the crowd of gawkers. He bought us pizza from the parlor a ways down the street. We found a bench near the city harbor and looked up at the stars that speckled the clear night sky. 

‘Loyal, each and everyone of then, and steadfast. I wish people were stars,” he said before our first kiss. “Are you my star, mon cher?” he asked before the second. 

We kissed and laughed and drank and danced under those stars the entire night. The moon our disco ball that we desperately didn’t want to drop. It felt, if only we could keep holding each other up we would never know a single moment of daylight. 

If only I could go back. If only I hadn’t closed my eyes and fell asleep on his chest. If only I didn’t let him get in that cab for the airport. If only it hadn’t crashed. If only Louis Belchamp had family who cared to bring his body home to Paris. If only I wasn’t the only one who prevented him from weathering away all alone. If only I didn’t feel as if this grave was now my own. 

A grave of possibilities, each one infinitely bigger than more brilliant than the last. 

“There is so many stars in the sky tonight, Louis,” I tell him. “You would love it here.” I dig my fingers into the earth and imagine its his hair, imagine I could pull him back up by the roots. 

I let go. Just so I can press the home button on my phone. Midnight flashes up onto my face. 

“Happy New Year, Louis.”

I say, before I go.