Melbourne/Canada 2018.
Saturday night, his car, sitting out the front of my house after a less-than-stellar dinner. Relationship status: terminal.
The radio was playing softly – classic rock, golden oldies, and I was readying myself to deliver the, it’s not you it’s me, speech.
But he got in first. ‘I think we shouldn’t see each other anymore.’
‘Okay,’ I said, mentally calculating how quickly I could get out of there without seeming rude.
It was the wrong response.
‘See? That’s the whole problem!’ He whined.
I stared, unsure where this was going, fairly sure I didn’t want to know. Suddenly, he lunged for the radio, cranking up the volume.
Foreigner. Cold As Ice.
‘This is you! You’re an Ice Queen!
The next day, not so much broken hearted as mildly pissed off, I did what any self-respecting Ice Queen would do. I embraced my frosty core and booked a solo trip to the Arctic.
Months later, there I was, aboard a Russian research vessel, standing on the deck as we embarked on a crossing of the Northwest Passage, the storied sea route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific via the Arctic Ocean.
The pack ice was bad that season, forcing the crew to chart a course through waters where none of them had sailed before, narrows in an area so remote, they’d never been fully surveyed.
Was it the siren song of an Ice Queen aboard their vessel that caused those self-same sailors to turn off the echo sounder’s low water depth alarm? Or was it because real men don’t need help with directions and besides, that depth thing makes an annoying beeping noise?
We’ll never know.
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