No, I didn’t really want to die
I only want to die in your eyes
Grant me one last wish
Life should mean a lot less than this

Silver Jews, “How to Rent a Room”

i’ve only ever seen iceland through the constrained and inadequate portal of a television screen.

the black mirror episode “crocodile” was written by series creator charlie brooker as taking place in scotland but, after a suggestion from netflix, was filmed in iceland. director john hillcoat described the island’s “strange, vast, and primeval landscapes with blackened soil” as perfect companions for the “coldblooded” story and the “cruel, inescapable logic” of protagonist mia‘s desperate attempts to cover up her murderous crimes in a world with technology capable of combing and displaying your memories.

succession season two opens with kendall roy, the wealthy son of an even wealthier media baron, soaking in an icelandic spa. the previous season ended with kendall, fresh off crashing a car into a river while high on ketamine and leaving his passenger to drown, once again under his father’s thumb despite attempts to wrest control of the 21st century fox-like family business he feels is his birthright. unwilling to take responsibility for his actions, kendall painfully decided he would rather be “nothing at all” than fulfill the cliche of the spoiled rich kid responsible for someone else’s death. iceland‘s vast, empty landscapes match kendall‘s dull stare and hollow appearance.

icelandic folk horror film lamb follows wife and husband farmers maria and ingvar after they discover a human-sheep hybrid delivered by one of their ewes. the couple’s farm sits atop a small patch of green within a windswept valley neighbored on all sides by a snowy mountain range, giving them the detachment and seclusion necessary to raise the strange child as their own. when their misguided experiment results in the death of the husband and the disappearance of the titular object of their affection, all the wife can do following a desperate, fruitless search is stand alone on a nearby hilltop, the blank whiteness of the mountains surrounding her as completely in reality as they do via cinematic framing.

watching all three, i was mesmerized by the long, uninterrupted shots of the icelandic countryside utilized by their respective productions. different writers, directors, and cinematographers all concluded separately that the only way to truly express iceland‘s natural beauty was through completely immersing viewers by giving them nowhere else to look and forcing them to contend with the foreboding totality before them. i envied mia and kendall and maria and ingvar, not for the specifics of their unenviable predicaments but for being there, in iceland, seeing it all firsthand and simply existing somewhere that felt both so tremendous and so unreachable.

i’ve been writing professionally for a decade and a half. i started making decent money when i was hired by kotaku in 2020. after being forced out of that job by abusive editors, i’m back to making next to nothing for a skill i’ve cultivated on my own with no formal training or education. at every level of this so-called career, i’ve wanted more anonymity. i often find myself wishing i’d started writing under a pseudonym. it’s too late for that, so my new dream is disconnecting entirely and moving to iceland with instructions for a select few members of my family to tell everyone i died. i want to die in your eyes and be able to live my life off the grid in a foreign country, learning a new language and maybe raising a mysterious lamb-child of my own.

but even that takes money. and my only option for making money, depressingly enough, is to continue cutting off strips of my flesh and offering them to you, to everyone reading, to an audience looking for any excuse to devour me whole. i’m shackled to a lifeboat that’s slowly filling with seawater, saved for the moment by the very device that will end up pulling me under.

so, tell them i died is my small protest. i hope you enjoy what i write here, whether it be my random thoughts on a video game, sloppy poetry, a creative writing exercise, or just something interesting i found on social media while unable to sleep. share it. tell me what you liked and what can be improved. but most of all, i want you to tell them i died, because eventually it’ll be true. or maybe i’ll just be on a black sand beach somewhere in iceland, alone and lonely but finally free.