Flow
They say drowning takes longer if you know how to fight back, and that those who instinctively know how must surely belong to the róin, the seals. That when the wild Atlantic waters decide to call you home once more to primordial soup, you must go. This is why, legend has it, fishermen in the West of Ireland do not ever learn how to swim. But instead bow down in surrender to the water-master, crawling back onshore, crablike, with their small black currachs on their heads.

If you come from an island of soft grass and dreamy mountains but one day you find yourself stranded in a dry and barren landlocked place of upside down seasons, sooner or later you will notice a certain restlessness about yourself, and wonder why on a bitter-cold day you can think only of shingle and bare feet. The cause of your unease is surely in your natural blood rhythms, suddenly desperate to be washing in time with the tides.

Missing slippery black rocks clutched at by blue-white fingers, poking at the solitary crab lurking in a pool beneath cliffs. Paddling out into a clot of jellyfish, searching for seaweed pods to pop. Seagulls keening overhead, sand silked between toes, feet slippered up in the welcome stickiness of it all. Standing on the shoreline, feeling the rhythm of life pulse in and out with the ebb and flow, resisting the water determinedly sucking at your ankles. Listening to the hiss of foam and the wind singing in the stiff grass atop sloping sand dunes. Feeling hot and cold all at once, bronzing from the heat of the sun, goosebumping from the chill of the whipping wind. Salt crystals crusting on the skin and tears rolling from squinting into the sunlight. Staring out across the glint of dancing waves to the rusting hulk offshore.

The smell. Oh! the pure clean fresh fierce saltiness of an inhalation. Who knew breathing could be so pleasurable?

And later the peaceful homecoming satedness of it all, as the moon begins to swell and rise, that wonderful bone-tired warmth that comes only from being battered by sun and by sea and by salt.