I was braced for the question this time, and determined that my response would sound more buoyant than it did at LAX.
“Where’s the other person on your reservation?” she asked.
“He’s not here. Not coming.” Chipper. Smiling.
The check-in lady didn’t meet my eyes, just typed. Fake smiles, wasted.
I was anxious to leave Oslo, but it wasn’t Oslo’s fault. Sure, the cobblestone of its historic quarter had done a number on my ankles, but I didn’t hold a grudge. The cozy city had welcomed me in spite of the dark cloud that I landed with. It was November, it was cold, it was the off-season, but it wasn’t dreary. The tortured decision to go was worth it for one late afternoon of peace on Oslo’s docks. I sat across from a group of little kids as they watched a busker blow giant, unwieldy bubbles during golden hour on the waterfront. Their coats too puffy to let them put their arms down, they reached up towards the fleeing orbs instead, a joyful adaptation.
And I had made my own adaptations. Slipping back into traveling alone was never the problem. Aloneness fits me and I’ve worn it more in my life than I’ve worn partnerships. The deep quiet of observation is like a drug to me—causing a calm I don’t usually know and spikes in creativity. So I really did flourish while taking rainy walks through Oslo’s more quiet neighborhoods and having the museums greedily all to myself. Be alone with a millennium-old viking longship and know thyself, I guess.
But Oslo knew I had more to learn than its viking relics could teach me. There were harsher lessons to appreciate.
I was still in shock. The needle of despair would swing from mere numbness to disconsolate tragedy at least once a day, typically when I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror of the tidy, modern box that contained me for my awkward stay. I’d look into my eyes and be so confused about my worth.
The trip to Norway hadn’t been my idea but that of someone I’d loved.
Caught up in the atmosphere of excitable millennials swooping down on Scandinavia thanks to cheap fares, my boyfriend had suggested we go. It came up casually on the couch one day and so then I casually said “yeah” and it was booked just as casually. After years of going overseas as a single woman, I would instead experience the world with someone I loved. It would be a different kind of adventure and during the wait—whether over movies, or drinks or when twisted in sheets—we’d drop our modest hopes about all the things we’d do in Norway.
But I didn’t visit any of the things we spoke about, and I never left the city.
When my trip was over, I hurried to the metro with a whole seven hours yet before takeoff. I was too tired and sore to loiter in downtown Oslo with my backpack after checkout time.
Looking back, I don’t feel like I forced myself to enjoy my trip, but it did feel exhausting to enjoy it, and some threshold had ultimately been reached. I wanted a nap… no… I wanted a hibernation. I wanted to emerge from my cave a year from then, once the emotions were somehow “over.”
It was on the train to the airport that I met my twin soul: a little bear cub that might’ve accepted my invitation to hibernate…
I slumped into a family section of seats, yet there were no families in sight. Like so many things in Oslo, the spotless and spacious infrastructure delightfully exceeded demand.
The train car was effectively my big, bright, quiet cave, until STOMP STOMP STOMP, a little girl in big boots plopped down ferociously across the aisle from me. She crossed her arms dramatically, tucked her chin, and rolled out her lower lip. Her dirty blonde pony-tail was frizzed with winter static, and her upturned nose seemed built for this whole performance.
She wore purple and pink striped tights with a matching sweater, broken only by a denim skirt. It was easy to imagine that she was made of these stripes from top to bottom. I followed these muppet-monster legs down to the boots dangling above the floor and took it all in.
I feel ya, kiddo. You’re my hero. This is the pouting aisle, and no one can be the bosses of us here.
But of course, she was actually out-pouting me like crazy. A pro. I think she expected to have the pouting aisle all to herself, because she remained only long enough to make a statement before returning from whence she came.
The train arrived at Oslo Lufthavn and from the platform I spotted something I hadn’t seen my whole time in Oslo: snow. As soon as the doors opened I scurried up a hill to investigate what turned out to be more ice than snow. But starved for small pleasures, I crunched my boots around in this ice for several minutes. A fond farewell to Norwegian soil.
My early arrival at the airport was a mistake. They told me it would be hours before security would let me into the line, so I waited on the departures floor overlooking a cavernous atrium. The desolate seating area came complete with some advertising designed to troll me:
GOODBYES NEVER FELT SO GOOD
These were the words splashed across a banner that was multiple stories high—an ad for the airline that had suckered me into this mess. On it, a larger-than-life, beautiful brunette couple were lip-locked. I sat for five hours with this twenty-foot tall make out session looming over me. I looked only once, forcing myself to ignore it, but I could feel the sheer cinematic import of it bearing down on me. This imaginary couple, taunting me.
Just a couple of weeks prior, I had been one half of a brunette couple, ready to get all kissy in Norway. One day he said “You’re the only woman in the world for me.” Just a few days later he left me during a phone call, in the midst of our first fight. I remember in my angst during that call, briefly thinking clearly enough to remind him that Norway was a week away—
“I’m not going to Norway!”
He didn’t.
I did.
When the security line finally allowed me, I was the earliest of birds, desperate to escape the couple of giants locked in jet-setting amour.
Few people would claim that airport security brought them relief, but that line provided a marvelously long and emotionally unburdened break. Something about standing, about the scant attention that it takes to shuffle forward every time the passenger in front of you does—it uses just enough neurons to keep the curtain of depression at your back.
But things were different when I got to the gate… when I got to the end.
I sat as far from the crowd as possible, where a little branch of the gate seating had been squeezed into a narrow hallway.
It was over. My backpack was on the ground, but the weight on my shoulders didn’t let up. The inky cloak of sadness had found me, and it had heavy hands that gripped my shoulders and hung off of me like another body to carry.
I wasn’t supposed to be alone this time. The trip hadn’t materialized as a lone person’s sojourn to enjoy Oslo’s off-season. It had come about as an adventure, overseas, alongside a very specific person. A non-refundable ticket wasn’t the reason I still went. I went because I’d hoped it would make me feel stronger, and sometimes it did. When I looked over the Oslo Fjorden, from the Akershus fortress at sunset, I felt strong. When I stood alone with the statues of Roald Amundsen and the other polar explorers—when I looked out over the water with them in the coldest rain I’ve ever known, I felt strong. Stopping to investigate every new color of foliage along the road in Bygdøy, I felt strong.
I hadn’t stayed in any of the beautiful landscapes away from the city as I had dreamed I would. I didn’t see any of the majestic fjords. No northern lights. Alone, I could only afford to stay in a claustrophobic hotel covered in scaffolding. It had a plywood bridge over the muddy gutter and the word “Box” in its name—a place that far exceeded my initial night in an aged Best Western by the airport.
But I went out every day. I made sure that I explored and that I came home feeling like an explorer. It was a badge that I would need to lean on in the difficult months that followed. I did my duty. I finally served myself, even though it was hard sometimes to see through the suffering that my instinct to go was the right one.
After a long and tearless day, I could finally feel the teardrops burning upward, coming for me. I put my face down over my knees, my hands clasped low. I let go. I listened with my eyes squeezed shut as the drops began to pit-pat down on to my arms.
Through the curtain of hair that I was using to hide from the world, I saw a very young woman wandering with a clipboard—an obvious survey-taker. I was scared to death that she would come try to interview me in the midst of my quiet distress. But looking around, I wondered if other people at the gate weren’t casting more than just a universal fear of survey-takers in her direction.
The Paris terrorist attack had taken place during the trip. The woman with the clipboard, who didn’t look over twenty, donned a sparkly white hijab with a pink shirt that represented her organization. I wondered how she’d been treated in the days since Paris happened.
Suddenly, there was a bit of a stir at the gate. Airport officials had come around and were directing everyone out of the gate and into the notably chairless main passage. I’ll never know what this was all about, but everyone went from roaming at the gate, aggressively trying to find outlets for their smartphones, to standing around outside of it, wondering what to do now that their phones were dead.
I was apparently the only person who was unashamed to just plop down on the floor. I still couldn’t seem to rein in my wet, red eyes.
Through the towering crowd, and through my own messy hair and blurred vision, I saw the pink shirt coming for me. I sniffled, preparing to suck it up for a survey or to at least utter something polite about how I just couldn’t.
Before I could even pull my hair back, a gentle hand squeezed my shoulder, and I looked up at the girl.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
Her clipboard hung limply from her other hand. Whatever I said back to this girl in that moment was brief and apparently unmemorable.
She squeezed my shoulder again and forcefully nodded toward me.
“You are strong.”
“Thank you.” We mirrored one another’s smiles before she returned to giving surveys.
My boyfriend had once seemed so concerned about sitting together on the plane since we hadn’t paid enough to reserve seats on the discount airline. So on the flight to Oslo, the usual pleasure of an empty seat next to me had instead become the specter of old happiness—our wish had come true in a twisted way.
On the flight home, a woman my age took the window seat in my three-seat aisle. As people boarded, it became very clear that I would, again, be flying alongside a ghost.
I watched with concern as my aisle-mate unloaded her electronics within the confines of her seat, piling things awkwardly at her feet, carefully not crossing any boundaries—
“It’s okay,” I said, “You should put some of your stuff in the middle. I happen to know they’re not coming.”
Originally written December 2015