Chapter 1

Well, Bump, I don’t think you’re going to like this.

You’re probably going to wonder why you even bother with me anymore. After all the effort you put into me. All those words I wrote you in the last years, pages and pages filled with my whiningabout how lonely I was and how much I loved Nicolai Lund.

To my credit, I did have him there for a while, that magnificent blond beast. He and I had everything, you know that. A beautiful home. A successful restaurant. A loving family. Loyal friends. And of course our love, as true and pure as Nick’s arctic blue eyes.

Or at least I thought it was.

Bump, did you ever hear about the myth of Icarus?

See, the legend goes like this…A brilliant craftsman named Daedalus—let’s call him Nicolai shall we?—designed and built a gigantic labyrinth. For the purpose of clarity, we’ll call this labyrinth adance club. So anyway, this guy had a son named Icarus. Let’s say Icarus was his loverinstead and let’s call himDerek O’Stupidity. Still following me?

Now, the two of them were trapped in this huge fiasco of a bloody club—I mean labyrinth—and wanted out. So Nicolai—I mean Daedalus—all full of hubris as he was, created these gorgeous feathered wings for both of them and said, “Derek O’Stupidity, have faith in me. I’d never do anything to hurt you. You have to trust me, yeah? We can fly, you and I.”

Anyway, let me just get to the end of the story.

Daedalus flies away with his perfect Norwegian wings, and the other guy flies straight at the sun, his stupid wax wings melt, and he falls into some ocean nobody knows and promptly drowns.

Good night, Bump. Thanks for listening.

By the way, it’s been three months since I walked out on Nick and I’m still drowning.

* * * *

Okay. Okay. I realize I may have come off as a taddark and depressed there in my last entry. What I didn’t say was: I’m going to fix everything between Nick and I. I will. I just need to find a way to tear out this giant tumor of resentment that has wrapped itself around my internal organs without killing myself in the process, and then,ifI succeed in doing that, the next step will be to swallow my pride, which is at the moment so bruised, it feels like I’m holding the leash on a tiger I accidentally smacked in the face with a wet cloth.

Does that make sense to you?

No? It doesn’t really matter. I’m here to express my thoughts, as nonsensical as they are. What I mean to say, if I mustclarify, is that I’m too hurt to function and too prideful to call him. Those two emotions have left me with a very narrow space in which to move and breathe.

You want to know what my days are like since I moved out of our gorgeous loft in the Old Port? Yes, Bump, the loft I’d meticulously decorated myself. That’s the one we’re referring to. Well, I moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Verdun. Remember Verdun? The place where I grew up?

Whydid I go back there, you ask?

Because somehow, I feel, I sense, that I must rewind my life and patch up some spots. Or using another metaphor: If my life is a mixed tape, I need to rewind it and listen to it again and see where the tape twists.

Oh, never mind the metaphors. I have no talent for writing, anyway. I pity you sometimes, having to deal with me.

Wait. Don’t leave.

Let me speak to you from my heart then. Let me try. Let me be that feeling man I was once. Not this sarcastic corpse. Help me, brother.

I’m going to tell you a story and I don’t know how the story will end. I don’t even know what the next word is going to be, but let me tell you how I forgive Nick, some time, somewhere, and how he and I find ourselves face to face again, gazing at each other adoringly one more time

Will you stick around for that?

Maybe you can be my Ariadne’s thread through the maze and this time I get to keep my wings 1

This afternoon I sat at my desk, in my beige office with no windows and terrible ventilation, at the financial institution foolish enough to hire a man on the brink of a nervous breakdown. This financial institution shall remain unnamed.

Jordan, one of my new colleagues, stuck her happy face in my door. She’s a young woman with a bubbly personality and a high-pitched laugh, that for some reason makes me want to hit myself in the nose with my pen holder.