There is just a gleam on the sand to remind me that it was ever here at all and a flickering of light, a movement on the horizon, to suggest that it might come back again. The beach it left behind is wide and gently curving, surrounded by low cliffs. A necklace of driftwood lies inches out of reach of the returning waves, adorning sand that, like a young girl’s skin, is smooth and white. Not far from me, a trio of oystercatchers tread rune-like footprints in a pattern that could be entirely random, but might hold the secret to the universe. Something catches their attention and their coral-red beaks turn in unison. They gaze in the exact same direction, as though they are three manifestations of a single soul. I sit on a guano-stained rock about twenty metres higher than the beach, as I often do when the weather is decent, sometimes when it’s not, and look out at a view that never changes, and yet never quite stays the same. Some days I watch surfers. When the surf is up, they appear like creatures from the deep, black and slick, only their faces exposed to the cold.
