Where the Water Kept Us

We took the boat out and the world forgot to follow us. You revved to full speed, as you often do,

and Greece opened beneath us; white wake, blue water, the mainland falling further behind us, until it felt as though we had outrun every version of ourselves except the ones we were with each other. There was something about being out there that loosened us. You became entirely yourself - sun-warmed, salt-skinned, dark hair caught wild in the wind, laughing without checking how the laughter sounded. I haven't seen you quite so happy, and it warms me even now to think of how you cackled when we failed to anchor. Perhaps this is one of the gifts of the open water: it asks nothing of you except that you exist. No performance, no explanation - just your body beside mine, the horizon unfastened before us, and that beckoning blue going on and on, sea into sky, like the blue of your eyes a thousand times over. We found little coves where the water turned glass-clear over rock, and the whole sea seemed lit from underneath, shimmering in green, then turquoise, then that deepening blue that belongs to places you cannot quite believe are real. Later, when the sun began to lower itself towards the edge of the world,e verything changed.The water caught fire first. It shimmered in sheets of orange and red, each small wave carrying a fragment of the sun. I held you then, held you against me while the evening gathered around us, your warmth becoming the one thing I could distinguish from the warmth of the day. The sea kept moving in ripples that melt away time, where gold became copper and copper became ember. Above us, the sky burned slowly through its colours - peach, rose, gash-gold vermillion, flame - until it seemed less like a sky than the remains of some enormous fire the heavens had forgotten to put out. Then came the purple: a long improbable streak stretched across the horizon as if twilight had taken a brush and drawn one final line through it's own dripping canvas. I was in your arms, the boats ahd gone quiet and the shore became a wavering silhouette dancing in the distance. For a moment there was nothing to want: not tomorrow, not elsewhere, not more, only this: your body against mine, the sea breathing beneath us and the sky mouldering overhead. I think I will carry it with me always - that evening, those iridescent colours, the way the ocean held the sunset and gave it back in pieces, the way you slid inside my arms as though you had always belonged there, and how, for a little while, we sailed in widening S shapes through the blue, leaving no trace behind us except the memory of having been there, together, while the whole sky turned to embers.