Fear No Ocean. Memory 7.

Please stay, he said, a hundredth time. I said, no. I wanted to go back to London, to civilization, to nightclubs, to Brixton academy, The Shakespeare’s Head, to suffocating tube, to Berkeley Square, to public libraries, to Caffe Nero, to Boots, to aimless wondering through Selfridge’s, to independence. I did not ask him to come. Truth be told, I did not want him to go with me. I loved my freedom and cherished it, and these couple of day in his company have already put a strain on me, I started to be aware of his presence in a bad way. I did not want to be with him unless it was absolutely necessary, like in the water, when he taught me to surf, or late at night on the beach, where he would drive his old fiat for us to stroll down the sandy line of the ocean, or when the salty wind made me sleepy, and I would fall asleep on his lap. But then he said something that made all those silly things like John Lewis household department and Hotel Chocolate testing club seem inadequate and pathetic, he said: “There is no ocean there.” And I thought, how right, there is no ocean there. And suddenly the ocean was the only important thing, and it was missing in my life, the enormous part of my life, and that’s why I could never get enough of it, and that’s why he would never swap it for anything in the world. He had the bigger, better, purer part of the world, why would he change it for anything else? The ocean will always have all the answers, there will be no questions. The thing that matters, the ocean that loved us and bathed us and gave us days and days of never-ending fun.

“Respect the ocean,” he would say. And I would just laugh, the ocean breeze throwing my hair around my head with joyful naughtiness.