The Breakup

It was a Saturday in the middle of summer and I was violently hungover. The kind of hangover that makes me want to split my head with an axe to release the pressure that is bursting through my eyes.

We had a call planned to start making our arrangements. Norway was filling up fast as Europeans fled the heat waves, so we had to make our reservations before everything was booked. I answered Tabby on my AirPods while I was sweating out on a park bench after a yoga session that had failed to make me feel better.

Okay, I muttered. Let’s book the fancy hotel. Hotel Sundal. A friend from work recommended it. It’s $400 a night, except it’s in kroner, so it’s 4,000 kroner, and the ratio is ten to one, so you don’t actually know what you’re looking at until you do the conversion, and your eyes pop out of your head.

I can’t afford that, she said. I thought I was getting the stipend. The money didn’t land.

You said you’d split stuff on this trip. I told you it was going to be an expensive trip, and we could’ve gone somewhere cheaper.

I normally pay for dinner and activities, but paying for someone’s entire vacation leaves an ick in my mouth. Like I’m paying for companionship.

I thought of a solution. We should rent a camper van. That way we have a car and a place to sleep. We can save on lodging and we don’t need to know exactly where we plan to sleep each night. We can let the roads and the people we meet carry us to unexplored fjords and mountains.

No, she said. I really don’t want to do the van thing.

The van’s the same price as a car rental. But she wasn’t listening. I was trying to listen to her. I heard that she wanted a bathroom to get ready in and feel comfortable in. She refused the idea of the van.

I want to go camping. I don’t have time to figure out where the good spots in Norway are because I’m working sixty hours a week. So I’m going to get there and get in the car and ask people and figure it out. Booking Airbnbs before you know where you want to go is a bad plan. I don’t want to spend a week in Bergen, a small Norwegian city. I’m trying to get into the mountains. We need a car for that. And we can’t book everything last minute either, because this hotel is already full a month out, because there are few hotels in general and because it’s 100 degrees in Madrid and every rich Spanish person is in Norway this summer to beat the heat.

The van gives us optionality. That was the whole argument. I wanted to be able to ask a stranger where to go and then go there.

At some point we got angry and to cool off I took a shower and came back.

But I didn’t cool off and the fighting got worse. I had flashbacks to tears in London and Chicago from previous trips. If we’re fighting this much over booking accommodations, what’s going to happen when things go wrong in a foreign country? It’s not gonna be pretty. A mix of courage, anxiety, and anger built up inside of me.

Hey, I said. I just don’t want to go on this trip with you. This is too much.

Instant relief on my end. Hurt on hers.

And then I have to go. I actually have to go, because I’m already running late for a friend’s party.

She begged me not to get off the phone.

I have somewhere to be, I said.

FUCK YOU!

Famous last words.

She texted later. She’d booked some places, I was welcome to stay in them, she just wasn’t paying for a van she didn’t want. And I was ready to just pay for the van myself and get hotels. I was ready to compromise. I was ready to fight hard for that relationship.

Then I got the long message. About how I hadn’t shown care for her. About how she wasn’t going to speak to me for a long time.

I responded politely. I was surprised. I felt like she didn’t listen to me and I felt like she wanted a vacation paid for. I pay for a lot of her. But not that.

And I had gotten back together with Angelina two weeks before, which made it a great deal easier to let this one end quietly.

So that’s how it ended.

I checked whether the plane ticket was cancelable, and it wasn’t, so I booked the van. I booked the fancy hotel. I upgraded the Airbnb to a nicer one closer to the city center. I bought all of it out of spite.

A few days before I left I was mopey. The forecast was gray with a high of 60. It was beautiful in New York. I had nobody to go with. I don’t like being alone.

My friend suggested I tell them my girlfriend broke up with me. Maybe they’ll make an exception.

They don’t make exceptions.