Chapter Twenty-Three
Milo
Tonight is my last night here. Tomorrow I leave, to go back to the US.
But, for now, I stand on the barren edges of the island – the same Cote Rock that felt like the strangest, most uncanny dreamworld when we arrived just days ago.
But now it feels like the stage upon which my life changed.
I’ll miss it. Everything about it. The snow. The tents. Puffins. Allie.
We’re waiting for everyone to assemble onto the little dinghies to take us back to Lars, who’s just moored up a few metres away, gazing up into the sky, vaping a puff and watching it disperse like the badass he is.
And although a part of me is grateful to get back to some humanity, to take a shower – jeez, I want a shower – I don’t want to leave Allie. I can’t believe I have to leave her. It’s unthinkable.
So much has changed and transformed. That first boat trip to the island, we couldn’t even speak without wanting to argue, to have the last, sharp, harsh, angry word.
I couldn’t envision, then, surviving these last few days.
But now, I don’t want them to end. I want them to loop and stretch and multiply.
I want adventures with Allie Lake. I want to wake up with her and watch her sleep.
I want to hear that laugh every day, for her laugh to be as familiar to me as birdsong.
I want to kiss her lips. I want to close my eyes and listen to her breathing, let it lull me to sleep.
How can I leave? How can I go home without her?
And yet, I have to. I have to leave. I have the awards ceremony.
I have a pilot to shoot. And Allie lives here, right now.
Her life is here, and everything about my own is everything she doesn’t want.
And there’s a part of me that’s scared to show her too – my real life.
Those darker parts of me, the flawed, true, gritty, real-life parts .
. . A part of me is scared I’d lose her.
‘Milo?’
‘Uh-huh?’
I turn on the snow.
Allie laughs, hair in pigtails, each one poking out from under her hat.
‘Are you getting on the boat? Or are you staying here forever with Lucky and Mart?’ A sunbeam perfectly lights her face, and I wonder if I’ll remember this moment, revisit the memory.
Just her, skin lit by sun, close enough for me to reach out, take her hand.
And her question might be a joke, but I’m so close to saying ‘Staying forever. With you.’ Instead, I say, ‘Oh. Yeah. Sure.’
But my feet don’t want to move. It’s like if they move, that’s it, it’s begun, a slow journey away from her.
We’ll leave this island. And then we’ll leave Svalbard, leave Norway, leave Europe.
And we’ll leave her. Once again, Allie and I will be apart.
Once again, we’ll be something that ‘was’ once, in a weird blink in time.
And maybe that’s what Allie wants. She hasn’t said much of anything, since the cabin.
Maybe we just pretended for the sake of the note, and that’s that.
I wanted that for a day or two, to make it easier for us both.
But now, one day with Allie could never be enough.
We board the boat, my chest a hollow cave.
Allie talks to Lars most of the trip back, Jameson films and Iris observes, and I watch Cote Rock slowly get further and further away.
I think about our cabin. I think about our kiss.
And I think about those two birds, two years apart, now holed up next to each other, the rest of the world outside.
And I feel sure, in a crystallised moment, that I’d leave it all behind for her.