mirrors

We used to scramble down to the water’s edge in swimming trunks and cheap t-shirts, grab handfuls of wet sand, and then try to blind each other. When the novelty faded, we’d drop onto our backsides at the point where the swash and backwash of the breaking waves heaved to and fro over the gentle slope of powder-fine sand, to dig our feet into its wetness, and feel the weird sucking sensation of the tiny grains being drawn out from under the soles of our feet by the rushing current.

We’d lie back, scooping handfuls of gloop onto our stomachs and limbs, smearing it all over until we were hideous creatures unrecognisable, or innocents made suddenly, shockingly aware of our terrible, advanced states of untreated leprosy; cue much vile retching and groaning, rolling over onto stomachs, rotating ourselves back toward the waves, and then dragging our disintegrating selves into the water – a panacea, don’t you know – to recover.

Being one of the shallowest seas on the planet, equatorial no less, the waters of the South China Sea are warm, and where the coastal drop-off of the east peninsula labours for hundreds of metres, to plunge merely a foot, they are as good as hot. Here, bellies down, ankles and heads protruding, we’d creep around exploratorily on the new found strength in our arms, determined, like Acanthostega, to conquer first the shallows, and then the beach beyond. We always succeeded. And so we live.