You and Sunrise

The sound of rain is a constant pitter pat against the window to my right. It’s sort of comforting, like the soft blanket that is tucked around my legs. Every once in awhile, there’s the harsher sound of when the rain is freezing and plinking against the glass, not quite snowing like it would if the weather wanted to match the season’s décor. In fact, today is abnormally warm for this time of year – December is usually all lacy flakes rather than wet water-drops.

I’m sitting sideways on the comfy gray couch in Jónsi’s flat, watching water stream in blurry rivulets down the glass of the windowpane. Glints of warm white from Christmas lights reflect off of the glass around the window’s edges, where it’s framed with the decorative lights, and if I look past the rain on the window I can see the misty twinkles of more Christmas lights across the street. It’s certainly the season for it; decorations have been up for almost a month now here in Reykjavík.

It’s December 16th this morning – the day after we get back from touring, and the day I go back to Höfn to visit my family briefly; right now it’s also four days before I board a plane and head to Germany for the holidays. Yesterday was spent burrowed under covers, ignoring the unpacking I should be doing. As a result, two suitcases (one little and one big) still rest in the corner of my bedroom (one open and one shut).

Now, as I hear a slight gurgling of the coffee pot in the kitchen and the clink of dishes together, I look away from the window. Other than the sounds and the light, there’s no sign that Jónsi is in the kitchen, brewing coffee. I’ve already eaten a small breakfast in attempt to get out of here a little earlier, and I probably would have left before now had Jónsi not caught me and insisted I stay to have morning coffee with him.

“Hurry up, I should get going,” I say, examining the slightly uneven stitching in the blanket over me. It’s a dark red and beige and boasts an old-looking floral pattern on one side, and a simpler green pattern on the back. It’s my favorite blanket here in Jónsi’s apartment – one he picked up a year or two ago at a secondhand shop. He says he just couldn’t not give it a home.

“Nonsense. There’s always time for coffee,” he calls and his tone is playful, lilting. Even though I can’t see him, I know his eyebrows are raised and his eyes are sparkling as he gives the little smilesmirk he has when he thinks he’s making a silly face.

I don’t say anything else; I only smile and look back out the window. It’s nine o’clock already and it’s still only beginning to be light, due partly to the cloud cover and partly to the dark of winter here.

That was one thing I loved about the tour – there wasn’t such constant dark. In a way, it was sort of strange to experience such polar changes in light every single day. Here, the changes are usually gradual. With snow comes dark and dusky twilight, and with summer comes light even through midnight – that’s simply the way it is. For me, even the thought of having such absolute daylight and dark within the same twenty-four hours all year around is bizarre. But that’s what was out there in the parts of the world we visited; the amount of light they had was fantastic, even if I napped through some of it instead of soaking it up.

Touring was something else though. Every day there was a new city with new faces and new little peculiarities unique to just that city, and I loved that aspect of traveling all over to play music. Every place was a new adventure, and there was always something to go wrong or right or just totally haywire. It was almost completely magical, I thought, and in my opinion it was just great.

Of course, there were some downsides to the whole thing as well. Handling luggage and instruments was hard on my joints, especially my hip, and performing sometimes gave me a headache from the sheer loudness of everything. In addition to that, most nights we didn’t get to bed until really late, so I was constantly tired – in fact, I’m still exhausted even after sleeping nearly all day yesterday and on the plane ride home from Toronto.

There was just something about performing, I found, that could keep a person wide awake and manic right up until they’re supposed to be conscious the next morning. Maybe it was the electricity rolling up off of the people in front of us, fueling us until we felt we could burst under the pressure fluctuations of sound waves. Maybe it was just the strobe lights making our brains spastic. Either way, I know how my body buzzed for hours afterward, tingling with leftover adrenaline and racing thoughts when I should have been sleeping. I couldn’t decide whether it was perfect or upsetting.

“Move your legs,” I hear Jónsi say, and I realize that I’ve completely zoned out, staring out the still dark window absently.

I draw my legs up so my thighs are against my chest and re-tuck myself into the blanket that I’ve just now decided is mine. Jónsi then sits neatly beside me, crossing one leg over the other at the knee and handing me the cup of coffee he’s made for me.

“Thanks,” I tell him and he nods once before taking a sip of his drink. I do the same and we’re comfortably silent for several seconds.

“Have you checked the weather yet today?” he asks me, and I can hear a hint of worry in his voice.

“Yep. Chance of snow in Höfn,” I reply, feigning nonchalance. In reality, I’m a little worried too – I’ve never driven the Ring Road in the winter by myself.

“Do you know how much snow is on the ground there?”

“Mamma says about twenty centimeters, but that the roads are all okay around there. Things aren’t drifting too bad either,” I tell him, answering one question and predicting the next two. I take a gulp of my coffee and end up burning my tongue.

When it’s just local, winter driving isn’t a big deal at all. Here in Reykjavík snow gets cleared off of the road pretty quickly, so things only make me nervous if it’s cold enough to freeze the roads even with salt. The Ring Road, the main highway that circles the island, is a completely different story. It doesn’t get salted, so it can be icy even if it has been cleared. To add to that, the road itself is slightly elevated from the ground, so it’s easy to slip off and extremely hard to get back on, even with studded tires.

Jónsi blows out a breath and casts an almost reproving look my way. “Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you? I don’t have much to do tomorrow anyway.”

I sigh. “No, I’ll be fine. I need to leave soon anyway, and you don’t have anything ready to go,” I tell him, taking another drink of my coffee and burning myself once again.

“Well you drive slowly, alright? It’s going to be crazy out there with this sleet.” I nod, and we finish our coffee in silence, he lost in his thoughts and I in mine.

John, Sigur Rós’ manager, says the tour went rather well. We sold out most of the shows, made a tidy profit from selling merchandise, and to top it all off, the Sigur Rós fans seem to like me. According to Orri, a couple of guys even asked for my number, causing John to complain loudly about international phone fares and quickly change the subject.

John is a pretty cool guy, I think. He’s older than all of us in the band are – either in his late forties or early fifties – but the Brit has probably got a better sense of humor than all of us combined. Consequently, he’s the one that writes the tour diaries to post online; no one else ever wants to take responsibility for the tedious job, so we tend to use his humor and fluency in English against him in this case.

Of the currently active band members, I’m probably the best at English, just because school is still fresh in my memory. Therefore, the others tend to throw a lot of the interview questions at me, even though many are directed toward me in the first place, what with my being new to the band and everything. I’m still not sure how well I like this arrangement – I’m not the best talker in any language, and unless music is involved, I tend to clam up when there are cameras or microphones around.

It’s actually sort of funny how terrible we are at the whole interview/photoshoot thing. One-word answers seem to be the guys’ default, and the falling faces of interviewers are something I’ve grown strangely accustomed to. Photoshoots aren’t much better though – in fact, they’re much worse. Frankly, we’re the most unphotogenic group of people I’ve ever seen in my life, and if I can recognize that, it’s probably painfully obvious to someone who knows what they’re doing with those kinds of things. What with Kjartan’s intense stare, Orri’s tendency to appear as if he doesn’t know what’s going on, Jónsi’s lazy eye and crooked teeth, and my propensity to blink or move right when the flashes go off; I’m surprised people ask for photos of us at all. Jónsi maintains that we look better in the beams of concert lights anyway, and I have to agree.

“Well, I’ve got a few CDs I think you’ll like if you want to take them along,” Jónsi says and then gets up off of the couch, heading to the kitchen. I finish my coffee and follow.

“What kind of CDs?” I ask him, looking curiously at the small stack of plastic cases on the counter.

He cracks a smile. “Seabear, Stafrænn Hákon, Radiohead. Björk, of course.”

“Seabear… isn’t that your friend that sings?”

“Yeah, it’s his band – they’re who Inga plays with sometimes. He’s pretty nice, though, so you can’t really not be friends with him. He’s got a funny way about him, and a catchy smile.”

“A catchy smile, huh?” I ask, my tone teasing and just short of suggestive, and Jónsi rolls his eyes. His right eye lags once again.

“No, no, not even! He’s my sister’s boyfriend!”

“Oh! He’s that Sindri! Well Inga had better watch out!” I say, and he shoots me a look.

“You’re getting to be just as bad as Sigurrós about this boy stuff,” he says, half teasing and half not. A little smile starts on his lips, and he speaks once again. “I should go see her tomorrow, maybe. Mamma says she’s been having a tough time with schoolwork…”

Then he trails off, clearly thinking about his younger sister and the namesake of Sigur Rós. It was a sort of coincidence, Jónsi tells me. The band was formed on the exact same day Sigurrós was born, and the guys had all agreed that it would be the perfect name to call themselves. So they split it into two words, thus making it grammatically incorrect, and called it a day. The name translates to ‘Victory Rose.’

“You should get going,” Jónsi tells me now, having snapped out of his daydream, and I nod.

“Yeah. Thanks for the coffee!” I tell him. After that, I gather a few last-minute items, take the CDs from the counter, give Jónsi a parting hug and kiss on the cheek, and then head out the door.



“So how was the drive here?” my father asks me, stabbing a potato with his fork and looking at me curiously. It’s a typical question for a father to ask, and I suppress a chuckle.

“It wasn’t too bad, actually! Jónsi had me really worried, but I just took it slow and I was fine,” I reply, reaching to take another slice of bread. “This bread is really good, Amma.”

The elderly woman across from me smiles with a touch of pride, and then adopts a distinctly mischievous look as she glances toward the older man beside her. “Well that’s no thanks to your Afi. If I hadn’t shooed him out of the kitchen earlier, he would have eaten the whole loaf!”

“Well the girl is right, Guðrún, your cooking is marvelous. I couldn’t help myself,” my grandfather says, leaning over to kiss his wife on the cheek, and the look that slips onto her features is one nearly identical to the look my mother gets when she’s about to blush. I can’t help but smile.

There is a small chuckle from my father as he watches the scene unfold, and then he speaks once again.

“Well I’m just glad you got here safely. I was tempted to just tell you not to come, but I knew this would be the only chance you have to see us before next year,” he says, and I can tell he’s half serious, and half attempting to make a joke with the fact that New Years is coming up.

“Next year,” my mother snickers from where she sits on the other side of my grandmother, and I have to fight the laughter that threatens to bubble up as I swallow a bite of bread – I don’t want to choke.

“Well yeah, I was thinking the same thing… I’ll really miss Christmas here,” I say when I’ve swallowed, and for a moment after that, the table is almost uncomfortably silent.

“Well we’ll certainly miss you. I’m sure Kristján will be glad to have you though,” my grandfather says, and I know he just doesn’t want to let my parents say anything snide about it.

“I really hope so,” I say quietly, sincere.

Ever since the big falling out, our family hasn’t exactly been the same. According to our parents, Kristján was supposed to stay and follow in my father’s (and his father’s and his father’s father’s) footsteps as a fisherman. He was supposed to stay in Höfn and live close by, settle down with a nice girl from here, and add little ones to the family. He wasn’t supposed to get a degree in graphic design. He wasn’t supposed to fall for a German girl passing through the city. And then, above all else, he wasn’t supposed to move back to Germany with her.

So of course, our parents threw a fit. They metaphorically kicked, and pretty literally screamed until Kristján just snapped. He was leaving for Germany next month, and that was that. He wasn’t coming back, because he had no family here anymore.

I had never been extremely close to my brother. We didn’t fight much, but we didn’t spend too much time together either. There was a six-year age difference, so he had his own friends and I had mine; the only place our circles crossed was with Bjarki, who was living with our grandparents. Naturally, there were times Kristján and I really got along, and those were good memories to have, but it made a sad sort of sense to me when he disowned me along with my parents. It was just the easiest thing for him to do at the time. Of course, I didn’t realize what a good brother he was until he was gone.

I had never had it as hard as Kristján did. Being the first-born and a boy, he was expected to continue the long line of fishermen in our family. It was tradition by now, and it was considered a direct insult to my father when Kristján refused to follow it. I was never expected to pursue any set occupation; it’s accepted that girls aren’t typically cut out for the hard life at sea. It wasn’t much of an issue when I moved to Reykjavík to make something of myself because there wasn’t a set career I was supposed to take, and it wasn’t very important to my father that I stick around to help him on the fishing boats.

I always knew Kristján was jealous of the freedom I have. He despised the cold even more than I do, and couldn’t imagine spending months of his life constantly freezing and drenched in seawater. He wanted to go to America, he told me once during one of the times that we were getting along really well. He wanted to live in Arizona and have a yard full of cacti; he wanted to have a job doing something very dry. Then, when I’d tell him I didn’t know what I wanted to do, he’d tell me off for not having dreams.

“Just wait until someone decides your future for you. Then you’ll know exactly what you want to do,” he said once, and the words were laced with resentment.

As the pressure put on him by our parents grew, he got angrier and angrier. The month or two just before he moved to Reykjavík was the worst – it seemed that everything that came out of his mouth was a snide remark about how I could do whatever I wanted to, and even though I never wanted to make him mad at me, I could never help it. Then one day, he just up and left.

“So what does the future hold for your band?” my grandmother asks and I snap out of my thoughts. “You mentioned something about another tour, right?”

I scrape my peas into a pile with my fork as I answer her. “Yeah, we’re leaving again in February. This one will be bigger than this last tour, but not as big as the one starting in May.”

“Busy busy girl,” my mother murmurs. “You’ll have to remember to save time for us.”

“Don’t worry, Mamma, I will,” I assure her, and she seems satisfied with just that.

After that, the real adults start into a conversation about the economy again and the slight fall lately in the money my grandfather is bringing in from selling horses, and I soon zone out of the discussion. I’m much more fascinated with the thoughts bouncing around in my head, and the pretty patterns the light from the overhead lamp makes as it shines through the water glass in front of me.



Later, after dinner and visiting is over, I head outside. Snow still swirls from the sky, and the pitch black of an Icelandic winter night is sort of ominous, but I head down the freshly shoveled path anyway. A little snow never hurt anyone (as long as they didn’t get lost).

I’m not surprised about the golden light shining out the barn door. I sort of assumed Bjarki would be around, although I wondered why he wasn’t with us at dinner. As I near the barn, I smile when I hear him whistling cheerily. It’s a tune I’m familiar with – from an old Icelandic song about a mother and her ghost of a child.

“Hey, stranger!” I call as I enter the barn, and in a couple of seconds he pokes his head out of a stall he’s mucking.

“Well hello Lára! Long time no see!” With that, he comes out of the stall and props his pitchfork up on the stall’s front, then walks over to hug me.

I laugh into the hug, sort of glad he didn’t kiss me like Jónsi would someone he hasn’t seen in awhile. Of course, that’d be Jónsi, so that’d be fine. This is Bjarki, and even though I’ve known him all of my life, all of the talk lately about us getting together has honestly made things a little bit awkward for me.

But so far, everything here is comfortable. Bjarki smells like winter horses, a cozy sort of earth smell, and something musky and faintly sweet that I can’t identify. His jacket is chilly, but he’s radiating warmth from working, and all this feels like is my lifelong friend giving me a hug because we haven’t seen each other in too long. It’s perfectly alright.

“Why weren’t you at dinner?” I ask him, breaking away from the hug to look up at him. Usually, he would be, as he works here on the farm full-time and often until late at night.

“This is my father’s second day back on land, so I’ve been spending as much time as I can with him,” he says and I nod. Now that I think about it, it is about time for even the last of the fishermen to come in from sea. Soon the harbor will freeze, and that would make it much harder for the boats to come back in.

“But don’t think I forgot about you! They told me you’d be here, so I brought Sót and Loki in for you earlier today.” He gestures to one of the stalls behind him, and at this, I can’t help but break into a smile and head in that direction. “Your grandfather tells me you’ve taken quite a liking to the latter.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” I murmur as I slide Sót’s stall door open. The horse immediately comes over to see what’s going on and I take the opportunity to take a hold of his halter and lead him out into the aisle. “He’s a gorgeous boy, isn’t he Sót? No, don’t get jealous, Sót, you’re still my sweet boy.”

I grab a brush from a bucket nearby and begin running it through the dark horse’s thick and tangled mane, then turn back to Bjarki. “But Afi hasn’t sold him yet? He’s really delicately boned and pretty – it would fetch a good price, especially from Americans.”

Bjarki laughs at that. “I agree! Americans and their delicates… But no, he said he wants to fine-tune his training and maybe show him a bit. It would be great advertisement for Kraftur, but probably not very cost-effective.”

I nod. “Well I certainly know why he’s interested in putting Loki on such a pedestal. Everyone thinks Kraftur only sires colts that are big and burly like he is.”

“Right! Right, but… you know. Things are looking up and stuff, but we’re still feeling the effects of the collapse. I think he should be selling more and strategizing less,” Bjarki says and I chuckle, shaking my head.

“Well that shows what you know,” I say, and my tone is teasing. He rolls his eyes, and with that we change the subject.

It’s nice to be back, I think. It’s nice to be just hanging out with my friend in a something-like-warm barn, with a warm horse all relaxed beside me and not caring that I’m tugging tangles out of thick mane. It’s nice to talk about horses and friends we both know and the weather around here and not have to worry about having to sound smart like in an interview. It’s nice to not be thinking about music for once, not that I ever thought I’d say that before now, and it’s sort of nice to just be me – a girl who grew up here, rather than a musician from Reykjavík.

We talk for a pretty long time. After awhile, I put Sót back in his stall, and begin brushing Loki instead, and Bjarki goes and gets a saddle from the tack room to polish – he always has to be doing something with his hands, he says. We discuss just about anything and everything that comes to mind. I tell him about the tour and what all we did, and he tells me about what’s been going on back here – how Ásta is mad at Heiðar again and no one knows why, and how Sigrún’s cousin came to visit from Seyðisfjörður and she turned out to be awesome. By the time we’ve run out of things to say, Loki’s mane is just as detangled as Sót’s is, if not more. His hooves are picked and clean, and his coat looks as good as it can, what with the extra fluff for winter.

Then, after we’ve been silent for a good couple of minutes, Bjarki speaks up again.

“Hey, do you think that maybe you’d like to go out to dinner with me sometime? Like maybe this week?” he asks me and I feel myself freeze.

“Well… I’m heading back to Reykjavík tomorrow morning. I’ll be going to Germany to see Kristján in a couple of days,” I say, dodging the question as best I can.

He looks unmistakably dejected, and maybe even a little offended at the mention of my brother. “Oh. Well send him my regards.”

“I will,” I nearly whisper, looking down at the brush in my hands.

“Maybe next time?”

“What?” I ask him, my eyes snapping back up to his – deer in headlights.

“Come to dinner with me next time you’re around?” he says again and I take in a breath, look back down again.

“Yeah, sure,” I tell him, and I can feel panic bubbling up inside of me. I don’t think this is a ‘just friends’ type of thing. I think he might be interested in me.

“I should probably go back to the house,” I say abruptly. “Thank you for getting Sót and Loki for me.”

“You’re very welcome,” he says, the normal kind of warmth returning to his voice, and I internally sigh in relief.

I nod once and smile, and he smiles back. “Be safe here.”

He chuckles before he answers me. “You be safe everywhere – you’re the most unintentionally reckless one out of all of us! And also, have a good time in Germany!”

I laugh. “I will. Thanks Bjarki.”

And with that, we share a last friendly hug, and I step back out into the cold night air, this time really enjoying the way the snow crunches under my feet and the feel of snowflakes landing on my cheeks.