The Hotel Bar in Reykjavik Where Jet Lag Made Me Honest

There is a particular hour in Reykjavik when the sun refuses to behave, and your body refuses to believe it. I came off a red-eye feeling as though my brain had been left on a luggage carousel somewhere over Greenland. The hotel bar was the only place awake enough to match my mood, all dark wood, low amber light and a fireplace that had clearly never heard of subtlety.

I do not usually talk. Crew learn early that the safest thing in a bar is a short answer and a long glass. But jet lag dissolves the filing system in your head, and the things that normally stay behind the counter simply walk out onto the floor. When the man beside me asked how I was, I said, flatly, that I was tired of being lovely for a living.

I do not usually talk.

He did not flinch. He was a geologist, he said, here to look at something under a glacier that had been quietly changing its mind for centuries. He had the patient, weather-roughened calm of someone used to waiting for slow things to reveal themselves. I found, to my irritation, that I wanted to be one of those slow things.

We talked about home, which I rarely do. I admitted that I own a lovely apartment I see for roughly eleven nights out of thirty, and that the plant on my windowsill survives purely out of spite. He laughed with his whole face, and it undid something in my posture that no amount of training had managed.

By the time the fire burned low I could not tell whether it was two in the morning or two in the afternoon, and neither could he. That felt like the right condition for honesty. I kept one small thing back, as I always do, folded in my uniform pocket. The rest of that night, and what I said when the bar finally closed, continues on TheFriend, where I am a little braver than I am here.

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