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The worst snow storm Oslo’s seen in years comes on one of the worst days Vilde’s had in years. It’s fitting, honestly.
“How was work?” Noora asks, shuffling her boots against cracked concrete as she finds the key in her pocket to let Vilde into her new flatshare. Pedestrians move fast around them, dodging steps while on a mission to buy eggs and bread, emergency bottles of booze; stock up on groceries like the weatherman hadn’t been predicting the blizzard for over a week now.
“Fine,” is all Vilde says, and moves out of the way for an oversized dog wearing a sweater to get past her. On other days, the sight would make her smile, feel giddy. Now, as she watches the labrador trudge through snowfall, turn the corner, she wants nothing more than to run after it like a little kid, hold onto it and pet it, hug it until the owner shoos her away.
She’d be crying if she weren’t with Noora right now. She doesn’t know why she doesn’t just go home and let herself do that.
This is better, though, she thinks as soon as she steps into the warmth of the place Noora’s been calling home for the past few weeks. The curtains are still bare in the living room, the last purchase Noora had made for the place backdated, packed up in a warehouse or maybe lost in transit, somewhere in Bumfuck, America. Noora says she doesn’t mind, likes the openness, needs all the sun she can get around the holidays, during the darkest weekend of the darkest season. Midnight seems to last all day, even at noontime.
When Noora asks about dinner, Vilde pretends she was listening, says she already ate. And when the power goes out right as Noora’s about to heat her up a bowl of soup anyways, Vilde takes that as a blessing, twisted as it may be, her demons on her side.
There’s a snarky comment from Isak, a memory etched away in her mind, something from the summer between sophomore and junior year of college when she’d spend each day that she wasn’t working with him and Even, sprawled out on blankets by the gay bar, sipping drinks and not thinking of the calories, of the way she last winced and then purged when a girl slipped her hands along the sloping lines of her stomach.
“I don’t believe it, it’s just shit I hear my mom say,” Isak had said, surely reminiscing on something more profound than Vilde can recall. Something about heaven and hell, seven deadly sins, the devil making people want to do what he says. Capital H on the “he,” always praising the man. Vilde’s not sure how well she remembers what Even said next either, something about poetic cinema occurring in real life; a main character moment. He’d played some Queen song on Isak’s speakers next, snapping the conversation short, and Vilde remembers that much, the energy of summertime filling up in her lungs, in her heart every time she hears a familiar guitar chord.
Vilde asks Noora if she was there that day. It’s the first full sentence Vilde’s formed in maybe fifteen minutes and Noora leaves her with a hasty “hold on,” her head shoved just about entirely inside a cabinet, searching for flashlights on the middle shelf.
This would be the time, Vilde thinks, to get into the details of everything that’s wrong. When Noora can’t really hear her, when she’s distracted, when she already thinks everything’s fine. Vilde could say it all: how her boss told her that once her current payroll period ends, they won’t have a position for her. How she’s still going to have to pay for her mom’s healthcare in full now that their insurance expired and can’t be reinstated unless her father does something about it, but he won’t, because he hasn’t answered her texts or her calls or even her cheesy cards that he used to cherish. Won’t send back pictures of them all hung up on his desk at his new home, wherever that may be. Vilde doesn’t even know if he’s alive, quite fucking frankly, and an evil, evil part of her that’s filled with more anger than truth, doesn’t even care. He’s only a shell of a person that matters in her life, anyway.
There’s simply too much happening, small things that are actually huge things like her therapist moving to Tromsø— and who the fuck even lives in Tromsø, actually, Vilde wants to know— and her doctor telling her that her new antidepressants might make her gain weight, so now she hasn’t taken the pills but she also hasn’t eaten a meal in almost two days because the ache in her stomach is the only thing that makes her feel like she’s in control, that she’ll get where she wants to be if she just keeps trying, but also she maybe deserves it, maybe she’s just always meant to suffer, that’s kind of been her life up until now, at least in the grand scheme of things and—
Vilde doesn’t know how she’s supposed to say anything that she feels, much less everything. So instead, when Noora hands her a flashlight, so cold to the touch it makes her jump, she says, “I’m sort of afraid of the dark.”
Noora chuckles like it’s a cute thing to admit— to be twenty two years old and have her blood pressure jump at the absence of light. Vilde can hear Isak science-splaining the irrationality of it all the way from Trondheim.
She’s never been particularly rational though, not in ways that really matter.
“Good thing I bought these with batteries already included, right?” Noora says, and shines a light onto the hallway floor, leading Vilde with a hand on her wrist. With the power off, Noora’s new apartment is a puzzle Vilde doesn’t know quite well enough to solve yet, only having been over a couple times.
Noora guides her along, and Vilde should be embarrassed at the easiness with which she softens into her touch, gets disappointed when they reach the carpet and then the couch because it means she can’t watch Noora slide her socked feet along the surface in a rhythm that she could almost time her breathing with. Almost.
She knows if she asked Noora to do it again, to do it all night, to do anything to calm her down, she would. She won’t ask her, though. No more than Noora would ask her to do the same for her.
“I don’t know why the dark scares me,” Vilde says, even though she knows exactly why. It’s one of few scientific phenomenons she can rationalize without help from a textbook. Lack of ability to see, to conceptualize, to make sense of one’s environment. Easier for prey to attack. It’s a simple concept.
Still, she thinks she almost wants Noora to tell her. To psychoanalyze her the way Isak and Sana and sometimes even Eva would, in a way that was playful but never not scrutinizing either. Everyone was always trying to crack her, to see if she had anything inside that she didn’t already spill out, unload when drunk and stumbling or just sober and tired.
Noora doesn’t say anything like that, though. Of course she doesn’t.
“You don’t have to explain it,” she says, and holds on tight to Vilde’s hand while their knees bump, settling in. It’s the same worn couch from the kollectiv, and Vilde’s in the same corner she used to always find herself in, Friday nights spent crammed between Chris and wine bottles and pieces of cold pizza she used to let herself eat, but only sometimes.
The kollektiv is filled with new people now, Isak having been living with Even in Trondheim for almost five years now, and Eskild moved in with his new boyfriend. Linn’s with her cousins, somewhere not far from Nissen, but they never see her much now. It makes Vilde sad. The thought of someone else, new people— maybe they’re all friends like they were, maybe not— in a place that used to belong to them makes her more sad.
“The lights will come on soon,” Noora tells her. Her voice is calm, entirely unaffected by the pitch black of their surroundings or the chill that’s taken to the air now that the heat is off. Her hand is still in Vilde’s, nestled in with a blanket on top of the bend of Vilde’s knee. She goes on to explain how they’re in the main sector of the city and power can never be out for too long because they’re close to a hospital, that was one of the reasons she chose the apartment actually, after learning it from the renter, a very friendly Danish man with a real, actual handlebar mustache, one that would have made Chris laugh, and actually she probably would have asked to take a picture— and it’s all well and good but Vilde just has to interrupt her.
“You’re the light,” she declares, the statement something like an epiphany though it could very well be the cheesiest thing she’s ever said— and she’s said a lot of cheesy things, especially when she thought she was straight, convinced herself she was straight; convinced herself Noora was straight too, even long after she came out in the summer after graduation, freshly broken up with William.
But Vilde means this. It actually terrifies her how much she means it.
Noora kisses her.
Vilde exhales.
She thinks she’ll have to give Even a call later, talk about that main character moment thing again. She’s not positive, but she might understand it a little now. Might even be living a little bit of poetic cinema firsthand herself, if the way she feels herself both breaking and healing in Noora’s arms serves as any indication.