He asked me to meet him at the bar one night, but I was home in the suburbs in Grafarvogur with my mom and dad, and I didn’t feel like it. I didn’t say it like that; I just said I was going to be with my little sister, but he got moody and weird. We were pretty much always together, so it felt like we’d become dependent on each other. That night, I noticed I couldn’t stand to sleep alone anymore; I was cold and I missed him. It was hard to fall asleep, I felt off, and I regretted not going out to meet him, but I felt a little guilty, too, for how little I’d seen my parents in the past few weeks. I tossed and turned because I couldn’t stop replaying the phone call in my head. I wanted to meet him, to check on him. Since I couldn’t sleep, I decided that I’d hop into my mom’s car and head to Vesturbær—I was going to surprise him, sneak into his bed, and wake up with him.

The front door to his place is always unlocked, so I showed myself in. In the entryway, I saw his shoes, alongside a pair of expensive heels from Kron. Sexy heels. I knew his roommate wouldn’t have brought home the type of girl who’d own these shoes. I figured that she’d be in the bed I’d gone there to slip into, and I didn’t need to go into the room to confirm it. I knew it. I knew in my gut that I hadn’t been enough. It’s obvious. I really thought we were going to be together—I’m a fucking idiot. Another woman always comes along.

I tiptoed into the bathroom and grabbed my toothbrush, my toiletries, my birth control. He’d wake up with this new girl and it’d be as if I’d never been there. My bike was outside the apartment, and I wheeled it over to the car. I was going to disappear from his life with all my stuff, and he wouldn’t even notice. The bike was really heavy, and it took me a while to figure out how to angle the wheel so that it fit into the trunk. I could never lift that bike by myself, but that night, I hardly felt a thing as I flung it over my shoulder and forced it into the car in a rush of adrenaline. I drove for a few minutes, parked the car by the ocean at a stretch of shore called Ægissíða, and howled with tears until there were no tears left, and then, and only then, did I trust myself to drive back to Grafarvogur. Everybody was still asleep. I snuck into my room and never let on that I’d gone out during the night.