Chapter 5: Toast at the Edge of the World

Chapter 5: Toast at the Edge of the World

I didn't want to lock myself up to eat within four walls. I set up a small portable table, grabbed my plate, my glass of wine, and went straight down to the beach. I sat in front of the immensity of the North Atlantic, the cold wind caressing my face as the plate smoked.

Taking the first bite was a revelation. It was a bomb of flavors that exploded in my mouth; the seasonings, the texture, the freshness of the food that I had prepared myself to pamper myself. I took a sip of the glass and the wine, which for weeks had tasted like vinegar and ash because of the bitterness, was now sweet, fruity, lively.

I finished eating and stood there, sitting, looking at my surroundings. He was no longer looking for anyone in desperation, he was not looking at the horizon waiting for a ghost from the past to return to ask for forgiveness; I only observed the landscape, the flight of the birds, the color of the water.

And then, in the same place as yesterday, I saw it. He was there.

He was wearing exactly the same posture, the same thermos and the same accessories as the day before. This time, when I observed him with a clearer mind, I did not see myself reflected one hundred percent in his figure; I was no longer an identical mirror of my absolute misery, because today I had advanced a millimeter towards the light. But there was still a part of me in it. A silent and invisible connection.

As if he had felt the vibration of my gaze through the space that separated us, the man turned his head. As he looked at us, the air seemed to freeze. Yes, there it was. I was not wrong. In the distance, his eyes showed the same desolation, the same abandonment and the same suffering that I had been dragging in my chest. No words were needed; castaways recognize other castaways by the way they look at the sea.

He did not move from his place, nor did he try to shorten the physical distance. He simply, with a slow and paused gesture, he lifted his thermos in my direction, offering me a mute greeting. I, holding the base of my wine glass, raised it in the air responding to the toast of broken hearts.

We remained like this for a second. A silent pact between two strangers on a beach in Norway. Then, he lowered the thermos, I lowered my glass, and each one returned to their own world, to their own thoughts, but with the subtle certainty that the cold was no longer so burning.