Aquamarine

I remember lying in an inflatable boat; not long after the edge of a typhoon had swung past the island we were anchored at.

And in this boat, we had puttered across the wee sound of water to a wee island with a tiny, tiny anchorage no more than a few yards wide.

The island was beautiful in the weirdest of ways; a whole heap of weathered rock. The island was composed of razor sharp blades of grass made of rough grey stone with cactus and rainforest like plants in between.

The sky was blue. There was no wind.

The water was aquamarine and small bright fish fluttered and swam below and all around us.

We moored between angles of rock; our dinghy suspended in the water between strands of rope.

We lay; our heads on the rubber hulls; sometimes eating an orange or a mango. Sometimes staring down at the fish and the coral below.

The air was heavy with heat and moisture, hard to breath, easy to sweat in. When we got too hot we would slip over the side of the boat and swim around in our tiny harbour.

Once we clambered a short way up the rock walls of the harbour but didn’t get very far.

Now that is memory and the photograph I took and mounted has gone away. And you have gone away too, gone so far away that I no longer know where you live.

I would say that is a sad memory but it isn’t. I dream about you sometimes and the dreams are often pleasant ones but the daylight I now have, life is even more pleasant, more surrounded with that aquamarine glow.

Somehow that shared memory has drifted apart; it is growing new shapes and new meanings and becoming separate. We will never meet to look at that photo and murmur.

I am happy and I am happy to hope that you are happy too. I am happy to have new memories and old memories and a life that winds along a twisty road with no signposts at all and no destination around the corner. Just a windy road flooded with growing memories that make my life aquamarine.