I might have thought my motorcycle accident on the highway off-ramp on 495 would have been the most cataclysmic thing to happen to me. But meeting Aidan, after my first surgery and before my second, was the event that shaped the trajectory of my life forever.

I flew over a guardrail going forty miles an hour and lay unconscious on the asphalt, long enough for everyone to think I was dead. When I woke, the EMS guy asked if I’d seen my motorcycle. I did. In pieces. My helmet’s facial piece was broken, hanging by the straps. I tried to lift my right arm to undo the chin strap. It bent unnaturally beneath the elbow. Pain exploded. I passed out.

Two surgeries followed. A living bone graft, metal hardware, months of therapy. Recovery taught me something I could not have anticipated: to be happy, simply happy.

Then came Aidan.

He was handsome, funny, and self-assured in a way that pulled me in. I handed him my interior designer business card after a night out, and left. Later he told me I was the only girl to ever walk away from him. That first connection—chaotic, unplanned—would shape years of my life.

We fell in love, hard and fast. Every corner of the world seemed to shrink to us. And yet, by my thirtieth birthday, our paths diverged. I wanted engagement, a wedding, children. He did not. We broke up, even though separating my life from his felt impossible.

For months afterward, I worked too much, drank too much, slept very little. I traveled, I surfed, I wandered through cities and deserts trying to find myself. Nothing worked. Then one morning, scrolling at my desk, I saw it: a photograph of snow-capped mountains plunging into turquoise water, little red cabins perched along the shore. Lofoten Islands, Arctic Circle, Norway.

I clicked on it. I stared. I didn’t know what I wanted, exactly. But I wanted something, some escape. I didn’t know how to get there, the Arctic Circle of Norway, sitting at my desk in my office in Baltimore. But I had a Norwegian lover in college, and so I reached out to him.

We hadn’t seen each other in thirteen years. We agreed to travel as friends. He wanted adventure; I wanted silence, snow, and the freedom to be alone in my thoughts.

I didn’t own hiking boots, or even a proper fleece. I packed a gold-trimmed designer duffel, a hot pink fleece I had never worn, and tiny wool anklets with pink and purple dots. I was unprepared, but obsessed. Every night I repeated: “I’m moving to Norway. I’m moving to Norway.”

When I saw Espen again at the airport, he was grown up in a striped button-down and short, businesslike blonde hair. Not the Kurt Cobain lookalike from college, not the boy I had flirted with and fallen in and out of bed with. But he smiled, and for the moment, it didn’t matter.

We flew separately to Oslo. He in business class, me in economy, both stubborn about window seats. The tension didn’t matter either. I just wanted to get to the Arctic.

In Oslo, the city was sunlit and warm. I wandered through parks, explored streets, marveling at the ordinary beauty of everything. There was a park lined with hundreds of granite sculptures of people embracing, of children dancing, of families wrapped around each other. Each figure told a story I couldn’t name. I walked among them for hours.

I ate shrimp on baguettes with aioli, removing heads and antennae carefully, marveling at the sweetness of the tiny bodies. I discovered a gelato so creamy and rich that I changed my mind about individually wrapped ice cream bars forever.

I slept little. I wandered at dawn, then at night, marveling at the quiet, the sun that didn’t set, the impossibility of it all.

Two days later, we boarded a plane to Bodø, in to the Arctic Circle. I kept glancing out the window, at the shifting landscapes below, , mountains folded into fjords; forests stretched like green waves; clouds hung low and pink in the sun.

I didn’t know what would happen in Norway. I didn’t know what I was looking for. All I knew was that I had to go, and that somewhere beyond that horizon, something might—just might—shift.

I didn’t anticipate clarity, or transformation, or a life-altering “awakening.” I only knew I had to follow the impulse, to leave the life I was stuck in and see what lay beyond it. I didn’t know the mountains, the water, the aurora, or the people would change me—or how profoundly.

By the time we stepped onto the first pier in Lofoten, I was acutely aware of how unprepared I was. My body, my mind, my assumptions—they were all exposed. I didn’t know if I would write, if I would fall in love, if I would ever feel happy again. But I was there.