The cold burned her heart

17 January, Helsinki

I was already  25, which meant it was her 23rd birthday.

We were living in Finland at that time, in my apartment. 

We had gone to Greece to spend Christmas with her parents just a month prior and I was already missing the mild Mediterranean winter I had seen for the very first time in my life.

Coming back to Scandinavia was exactly what you'd expect it to be like -cold. The streets were cold and the people were cold and I, as a very pale and blonde Swedish guy, was cold. Of course, with Amara in my living room, my home didn't feel cold. She brought all the gentleness of the south with her, or at least that's what I wrote down in my journal, as our friends were singing her happy birthday in Finnish.

Living in Helsinki sometimes felt strange for me. All of our friends were purely Finnish, and I sometimes felt like a Swedish alien. I never understood why Amara didn't. She was the odd one out -she was the scorching sun of Crete, while we were the angry blizzard of Scandinavia.

That day, she was so happy. She cried when our friends left at 5 or 6 in morning and she crashed on the couch in front of the fireplace. She stared at the ceiling for minutes.

I am now paying so much attention on the notes from that specific day because of the strange atmosphere that I presented in my writing. 

''She looked up through the 4 floors above our apartamanet and looked like she was asking Heaven what she has done wrong.''

When I asked her why her mood changed so quickly, she told me I should know why, and locked herself in the bedroom, and cried herself to sleep. I stood in front of the door for hours, begging her to let me in. 

I was too drunk that night to know what I had done wrong and now I regret never asking our friends what I did. But fairly, I probably didn't do anything other than getting completely wasted. Athough I wasn't writing that down, the tension between us was already rising since our vacation to Greece.

Mentions of what was wrong  don't appear until much later in my journals. That's because I was still denying what was happening, I was denying she was already falling out of love, I was denying I was no longer what she wanted. 

And now, after all that has happened, I do blame myself. I stopped being the person she had fallen for, I stopped playing the role I agreed to play when she said her first I love you.

But then, of course, I wasn't blaming myself.