Chapter 7 #2
This is it, I think, watching two college-age youths holding hands pass me by, one throwing their head back and laughing at something the other said as they head into a restaurant.
This is why I want to see the world, why I need to see the world.
Because maybe if I search hard enough, I’ll find the little piece of this world that’s just for me, where my puzzle edges don’t need to be forced into place anymore.
The cool wind blows through the ends of my hair, and I close my eyes and breathe in the scents of the city.
The smell of bread wafting from a nearby restaurant on the corner.
A whiff of cigarette smoke carried on the breeze.
Someone’s floral perfume as they pass by on the sidewalk.
It’s the last one that sends my mind running back to the past instead of staying rooted in the present, and I’m hit with a specific childhood memory that I haven’t thought about in ages.
It was summertime, still several weeks before my fifth birthday, and I lay in bed one night flipping through a picture book I’d checked out of our local library earlier that day.
I still recall the photos of elephants and giraffes and lions from safari in South Africa, and how even that young I felt the need to go everywhere, to see everything.
My mom knelt beside my bed—I hadn’t noticed her come into my room until her floral perfume drifted over me as she pulled the book from my hands and placed it to the side.
She needed to talk to me, she said, about an idea she wanted me to consider.
She was thinking about starting me in kindergarten that fall along with my brothers, despite my fifth birthday falling weeks after the deadline.
That hadn’t been the plan. The plan was that I was finally getting a whole year of my mom’s undivided attention while my brothers were off at school all day, something I’d looked forward to for months.
We’d take trips to the library, and the mall, even just running errands… it was going to be just the two of us.
I talked to the principal, she told me that night, changing everything in an instant. We both think you’re ready. You’re so mature for your age. And you’re so smart. What do you think?
It was hard to be upset amid her praise, and I always wanted to please her. So, I nodded my head and smiled, going along with it.
I’m so proud of you, she’d told me, her smile filling me with warmth as she stroked a hand over my hair. I never have to worry about you, Mona. You know that?
Even at four years old, it didn’t feel like a compliment. But my mom never noticed how quickly my smile faded, because she was already out the door.
“You ready, Mona?” Ben’s voice calls from behind me, and my eyes snap open to the lively city in Iceland once again.
With one last glance at Hallgrímskirkja, snapping the sight into my mind like another Polaroid added to the memory book, I tuck my notebook into my tote bag and stand.
“Yeah. Let’s find some food. I’m fucking starving.
” Then I do my best to forget the sudden, grossly vivid memory and the simmering pang underneath my rib cage it left behind.
Ben and I walk along Rainbow Street, filled with local shops and restaurants, as we scope out something to eat for dinner.
As the name suggests, the bustling street is painted in stripes of color like a rainbow, originally done once a year as a symbol of diversity during Pride celebration until the city made it permanent in 2019.
Pride is one of Iceland’s largest celebrations of the year, attracting visitors from all around the globe, and this lively street will definitely make my article.
Ben maneuvers around me, searching for the best angle to take photos of Rainbow Street with Hallgrímskirkja looming in the background, and I pull out my iPhone and snap a few more selfies of my own, earning me another scowl of disapproval from Mr. World-Renowned Photographer.
Eventually, we find a seat at an outdoor table at a place named 101 Reykjavík Street Food and place identical orders of fish and chips, probably because it’s the first thing listed on the menu. Once our waitress is out of earshot, I audibly groan.
“I literally don’t remember the last time I ate,” I bemoan, resting my elbows on the wooden tabletop to support my famished body.
Across from me, Ben’s glazed eyes and slumped posture suggest he’s pretty depleted as well. “For me it was the pretzels on the plane. I’ve been hungry since the Blue Lagoon, but exhaustion won out over eating.”
I know what he means. Despite the nap I took after the whole beeping debacle, exhaustion is quickly setting in again.
“So,” Ben says, changing the subject, “what’ve you been up to for the past fourteen years?”
Anxiety hits me. Hard. “I told you I don’t want to talk about the past.”
His hands shoot up defensively. At the table beside us, a young couple animatedly laughs as a tiny bird lands near their table and struggles to steal an abandoned French fry. “I’m not asking about our past,” he says, refocusing. “Just what you’ve been doing all these years since. That’s all.”
I clear my throat, prepared to keep my response casual and surface-level, easy and breezy.
“Well, after you disappeared from our lives”—Shit!
That isn’t surface level at all!—“I mean, uh, after we last talked, I finished my senior year, studied journalism in college, then was lucky enough to land an internship with Around the Globe. That about sums it up.”
He watches me quietly for a moment, those daunting green eyes searching my expression for any tells. “Mona, I never intended to—”
“It doesn’t matter now, no need to discuss it.”
Ben leans across the table onto his elbows. “I think we do need to discuss it.”
“No.” The hardened edge in my voice takes me by surprise. I know it catches Ben off guard, too, when he leans away from the table and blows out a long exhale. I let a heavy beat of silence pass then say, softer, “Why photography?”
“You first,” he volleys. “Tell me all the places you’ve traveled with Around the Globe.”
The waitress brings over cardboard baskets filled with fish and chips, providing me a needed reprieve from this conversation.
I can’t bring myself to admit to someone who’s traveled the world multiple times over that, despite my job title, this is my first international trip.
Especially when I used to tell that same someone how I couldn’t wait to get out of Hudson Springs and see the world.
Late on those summer nights at the lake, we’d sit on the dock for hours with our feet dangling in the murky water below while I droned on and on about all the places I’d see first. Spain, Greece, South Africa, Argentina, Egypt, the Galápagos Islands, and (of course) Italy were all at the top of my extensive list.
Fourteen years later, I haven’t been to a single place I said I’d go.
Meanwhile Ben’s been out there living my dream, while I’ve been busy visiting not one but two different glass-blowing expos. In Scranton.
After assuring our waitress there’s nothing else we need at the moment, she glides away from the table, and I give a vague, “Oh, you know, here and there,” response to Ben’s question.
Luckily, since we’re both famished, conversation comes to a natural halt as we dig into our food like two contestants on Survivor.
The first bite of fish is light and flaky, with a crisp batter that’s not at all greasy and feels like heaven in my mouth.
101 Reykjavík Street Food will be getting a glowing online review.
Within five minutes we’ve both shoveled the entirety of our dinner into our mouths, and I wipe my chin with a paper napkin as I say, “You didn’t answer. Why photography?”
Ben starts to reply, but a middle-aged man wearing a luminous smile and the same brightly colored T-shirt as our waitress approaches our table with a box of Icelandic chocolate bars and declares, “You finish your food, you get chocolate,” and hands us each a candy bar before moving on to the next table.
Chocolate for gluttony? I really do love this town.
I tear open the paper wrapper to indulge myself, but across from me Ben turns his chocolate bar over in his palm, expression fading to something vacant and far off. Deciding to hold off, I rewrap my chocolate and drop it in my bag. “Ben?” I prod.
Blinking up at my voice, he says, “You know my parents finally divorced senior year, right?”
I’d heard about the divorce before I left for college, but by that time Ben hadn’t spoken to me in almost a year.
And the truth is, I didn’t know either of his parents all that well.
I can picture his mom, Charlotte: youthful round cheeks and golden hair the same shade as Ben’s.
Now that I consider her from an adult perspective, I wonder how old she was when she had Ben.
She couldn’t have been more than early twenties at most. “I heard. I’m sorry. ”
“Don’t be. My father was the prime definition of an asshole.
” Years later and there’s still a bitter bite in Ben’s voice.
“After he left, my mom was…different.” A muscle in his jaw ticks on the word.
“Long story short, she got fired from her job, and we certainly weren’t getting a dime from my father.
I needed to support us, and my summer job at The Boathouse wasn’t cutting it. ”
I remember Ben waiting tables at the local restaurant in our hometown, a hot spot for the tourists who came up from the city during the summer season to vacation near the lake.
More than the restaurant itself, I remember Ben’s casual uniform consisting of jeans and a navy tee with the restaurant’s logo screen-printed in white across the chest, so worn the lettering had begun to peel away.
I used to trace that logo so often that I feel the phantom texture of it now, rough against my fingertips.