Sometimes living in a foreign country feels like being on a permanant exotic holiday, and other times it's just felt lonely and isolated. These days it's pretty much always like being on holiday—bar having to go to work every day, of course—but the first year I spent here, in hindsight, was pretty miserable.
It didn't help that I went and got myself pregnant almost immediately after stepping off the plane. Twenty-three years old and just about to start my exciting new career, and I go and get myself knocked up. I only had myself to blame, of course; it's not like I didn't know how babies were made. But I was so insouciant and in love—well, kind of—and anyway, we'd been doing it standing up.
But after the test results my relationship with that boyfriend changed. It stopped being about mojitos and Kaffibarinn and getting to know each other, and started being about choices and hospital appointments and anxiety attacks. It wasn't a difficult decision to make; I had the abortion. I'd come here to explore, not to sit in a modern two-bed apartment in Kopavogur with a child that I didn't know how to feed and a boyfriend that was rapidly going off me. Of course we still cared about each other, but I suddenly realised that a) I barely knew him, despite having lived with him for two months, and b) I didn't have anybody else in the whole country that I could call a friend.
Icelanders aren't the easiest of people to get to know. I'm generalising, of course, but they can seem a bit stand-offish, and the small population means they all have their social circles pretty clearly marked out. There's not much room for outsiders, especially not ones in the middle of traumas such as oh-god-I'm-up-the-duff-and-I-don't-even-know-how-to-say-that-in-Icelandic. I felt completely isolated all of a sudden, and after the abortion found myself becoming reclusive and introverted, which scared me, because I was usually so gregarious.
Although, at the time I didn't think I was that greatly affected by the pregnancy itself. It seemed like an inconvenience that I had to get through more than anything else, and I put any emotional outbursts down to hormones, rather than actual feelings. I certainly never regretted anything about the decisions I'd made (well, except the standing-up one, perhaps), and know that I never will. But in hindsight, now, I can see that actually it did affect me, it just took me a long, long time to admit to it, even to my closest friends back home. Partly because I felt guilty about being so careless in the first place, and partly because I thought I'd done such a great job convincing everybody that everything was great.
Three years down the line and everything really is great. I left the boyfriend (though probably a little too late) and managed to crack through any initial stand-offishness to make friends with some of the warmest people I've ever known (you know who you are). But I was reminded of all that shit stuff tonight, as I cycled home from work, whistling (or at least trying to whistle and making a kind of blowy-sucky sound), past my old apartment where it all kicked off. I was struck by old memories and a weird, sick, nostalgic feeling, and it hit me that these days things are completely different. I have that exotic holiday feeling nearly all the time now—bar having to go to work every day, of course—and I'm so glad I stuck it out through that strange, alien first year, instead of turning around with my tail between my legs and sloping off back home.
I wish I'd had this blonk back then, or written down all of this when it happened, but I didn't, so here it is, three years too late.
