The Lighthouse
By Michelle Spinei
I went to school here, you said as we drove by a nondescript building on our way to the lighthouse. You liked to show me apartments you lived in, the bar where you met your first girlfriend, the garden you passed out naked in after Culture Night — personal landmarks to map a constellation of intimacy.
Soon you would be working on a fishing boat, but first we would visit the lighthouse. We could walk to it if we timed the tides correctly, or we'd get stranded there. The July sun caught the glint in your eye.
Arctic terns crossed overhead, to the sea and back, to the sea and back. The sky was streaked blood orange and framed the glacier in a halo.
The beach, our only access point, was closed for nesting birds so we perched on the seawall, the cold seeping through my jeans. Pointing across the bay, you showed me where your father lived over the mountain range. Your mother moved to Denmark when you were a teenager, where she was institutionalized. And across the ocean, your ex, who had left the island and had not come back. It was platonic but you were still in communication, you said, as smoothly as a weather-worn rock.
In a few days it would be a full moon, the Rose Moon, and I felt open-minded and full of compassion. Love is fluid, I thought, migratory. And no one really owns anyone, anyway.
When you were gone, I visited the lighthouse imagining you were in the boats on the horizon. Like the tern you came back, then out to sea and back, to your ex and back, but by then I had written my own memories in the margins of your buildings, bars, and gardens, and like the beach, I closed myself off.
THE END
Author Bio: Michelle Spinei’s work has appeared in Catapult, Hinterland Magazine, Ós Pressan, and elsewhere. She is an American currently living in Iceland with her family.