I played a role until it became the threads that held me together.
I lashed out.
I did drugs.
I made my father make the hard decisions.
And then I pretended it didn’t kill me when he made them.
My father sent me away because he couldn’t handle me, because I became the bad son, the fuck-up. He was starting to resent me anyway, why not take it all the way and give him a good reason?
So I went to America.
To my mother, who hated me so much that she left her whole family behind and chased after some guy who barely knew her. I knew my mother didn’t want a family to begin with, I knew she treated me, Astrid, Tove, Lise, like we were unwanted pets running around her house. But knowing that didn’t make it easier, didn’t ease the pain when she suddenly up and left us, breaking our family in half.
My mother definitely didn’t want me with her in New York, fucking up her new perfect life with her new man. But she had no choice. Though she wasn’t my mother in her heart, she was on paper.
And so I was shuffled between two parents who didn’t know what to do with me, who didn’t want much to do with me. How could I not hate myself?
Shay was the only thing I had. When I was with her, I could pretend that her love was all that mattered. I could pretend her love was the thing that was going to save me, redeem me, make me a better man. Make me a man, period, not just some scared damaged little boy.
But then it got to be too much.
I couldn’t keep up the charade forever.
I knew Shay deserved to be with someone that I wasn’t, because what I really was, deep down, beneath the emo poetry and the bad tattoos and everything else that I carefully crafted to hold me up, was someone inherently unwanted and unlovable. And, eventually, she would see that version of me. And she would leave me.
So I never gave her the chance. I pushed her away, put up the walls, started lashing out and cheating and doing more drugs and skipping school, because it was easier than being rejected by her.
That was my biggest mistake and I’m making it all over again.
I’m making excuses for us to be apart, I’m ignoring the fact that I’ve fallen back in love with her, that she makes me feel like a fucking god, and I’m pushing her away because I think it’ll be easier in the end.
But it won’t be easier.
It will hurt worse than before, and once again I’ll only have myself to blame. When you’ve lived most of your life in guilt and shame, the finger pointed inward, relentless in blame, it becomes second nature. You start to think you deserve it.
But she makes me feel like I don’t. Like I’m someone worth loving. That I have more to offer the world than what I’m currently giving.
I can’t lose that. I can’t lose her.
And yet it feels like right now, I’m about to lose it all. Every single thing that I love.
“What is it? Where are we?” Shay says sleepily, lifting her head and looking around.
“Just outside Trondheim,” I tell her. What I don’t add, is that this is her chance to say goodbye if she wants to take it. I don’t tell her because I don’t want to push her away anymore, and that’s exactly how she’s going to take it.
“I must have been tired,” she says, and then I take the exit onto the 707, away from the city and heading toward the coast. Her chance to leave me disappears in the rearview mirror.
She knows it too. She watches the exit disappear and a look of soft determination comes across her brow, her eyes focused on the road ahead. The road forward.
From where we are, it’s another three hours to the fishing village, and we’re silent most of the time. Sometimes the radio is on, but the pop songs and chipper yammering is too much for me to handle right now. Sometimes Shay talks about the villages we’re passing through, sometimes she brings up small talk, but she’s not taking any pictures and there’s this heavy weight that’s descended inside the car.
We’re both hanging on by a thread, waiting for what happens next.
Eventually, we reach the fishing village of Bessaker, nothing more than some old weathered red buildings along a rocky and lichen-covered coast. It’s hard land out here, bare and unforgiving, and though the sun would normally be out, right now the storm has swept most of the light away. It’s dark, almost as dark as night, and the wind flings itself off the Norwegian Sea, whipping against the car.
The docks are full of activity, with a news van from Trondheim, and other cars parked in the lot, people milling about, flares and flashlights at the ready for when the world plunges into night.
It’s so stormy, wet and rough out, that I tell Shay to stay in the car, pulling my Helly Hansen jacket out of the backseat and slipping it on, the rain already soaking me.
But Shay remains stubborn as always. She’s out of the car, yelping as the wind nearly knocks her over, and goes to the trunk, grabbing her flimsy rain jacket and pulling it on.
I grab her hand, part of me grateful that she’s by my side, even though it’s safer inside the car, then I’m pulling her along toward the crowd of people.
I make myself known, barely heard above the roar of the storm, and one of the search-and-rescue guys
