Bright Midnight

But Danny decided on Europe, and I wasn’t about to let him go without me. We saved up. We stayed in Capri for months. Made friends, got jobs bartending and getting paid under the table, lived la dolce vita.

And then…

He dumped me. Suddenly the whole “let’s go to Europe and have fun” decision from him became less about us having a new experience together, and more about him not wanting to settle down and commit. Suddenly it all made sense.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. I mean, I knew our relationship wasn’t perfect—I knew that over the months things between Danny and I had been strained, I had that niggling feeling at the back of my head that things weren’t quite right. It often came at me late at night when he was sleeping beside me. I loved him but…was this it? I had experienced butterflies and fireworks once upon a time—was that a thing of the past? Was it just going to be like this between him and I forever?

Naturally, the beauty of Capri was an easy distraction and I buried those feelings away, until he broke up with me. I can’t say I’m crying over it anymore—it’s been over four months since I left Capri and he went back to New York—but that doesn’t mean I’m quite right yet. My heart, and my pride, has been in repairing mode ever since. This kind of breakup is like when you drop your smartphone on the ground—the screen might be cracked and hard to see, but you can still use the damn thing.

So, with Danny out of the picture, I’m on my own. Alone. This is Shay Lavji’s default mode, how I’m used to operating, and I’m choosing to see the bright side. Which is, mainly, now I’m free to go where I want, see what I want, and there isn’t a single person or thing out there that I’m responsible for.

I sigh as the rain starts to fall again, a drop here and there rippling across puddles beneath the statues. Even though I’m free as a bird, I can’t ignore the creeping realization of how incredibly lonely it can be when you don’t have someone to write home to.

Which is probably why I did something kind of crazy this morning.

“Shay,” Michelle cries out in her sing-song voice. “Are you coming?”

I smile and nod, noticing the mom giving me a look of pity before I walk after them, the father and the son, Stuart, already at the bottom of the stairs waiting for us.

This is the Wright family, from Birmingham, England. I met them this morning when I was having breakfast in the hotel’s breakfast room, mowing down on a typical Norwegian food (one that the hotel touted as “the best breakfast in Oslo” but being new to the country and city and having never had a Norwegian breakfast before, I can’t quite attest to that. I’m not sure if the best breakfasts have more smoked, dried, or pickled fish or less smoked, dried, or picked fish).

Anyway, this morning I woke up in kind of a funk. Yesterday I arrived in Oslo only to find the city cold, wet, and miserable. Unlike Ireland, where I’d just spent three months working at an inn in a small town, the people here didn’t smile, didn’t meet your eyes. Even during the nastiest gale blowing through the land, the Irish always found an excuse to keep that twinkle in their eyes.

This didn’t exactly start my experience in Norway off on the right foot. Maybe because I had too many hopes and expectations—this was my dream country after all—but I was left feeling a bit disappointed. I traversed the streets trying to capture images for my travel Instagram account, yet ended up back at the hotel soaked to the bone and lonely. Even a long Facetime chat with my friend Amber back in Capri didn’t lift my spirits, and there’s nothing like a hotel room to make you realize how alone and unmoored you really are.

So, while balancing layers of smoked salmon and cucumber on top of teeth-breaking crisp bread this morning, I couldn’t help but eavesdrop on the family next to me, chatting in their lilting British accents about their plans for the day. First, they were going to check out the Viking Museum, then Frogner Park, then make their way down to the royal palace to ooh and ahh over the guards and all that fancy shit.

And then I did something I never expected.

I leaned over, smiled with a mouth full of salmon goodness and asked, “Can I come too?”

The mom stared at me like I was crazy—because obviously I fucking am—and exchanged a worried look with her husband. No doubt she’d heard some weird horror stories over the years about deranged solo tourists. But Michelle said, “Sure you can! What’s your name?” and when I introduced myself as Shay, her brother, a few years older, said, “Don’t you have any family?”