SEA WATER

Breathe in. The air tastes like salt.

Breathe out. You feel the wind tugging at your hair.

Once I was asked when I fell in love with the sea. And to be honest, I don’t think I had an immediate answer. I don’t think I was sitting at a beach staring at the sea thinking: This is it. Every place should be surrounded by seawater, should have this endlessness and those little white ponies dancing on the waves. But I kept thinking about it and when I reached windy Marseille last month – where ferry boats were cancelled and you couldn’t hear each other’s words because the wind was just so strong – it was then when I remembered when and where I fell in love with the sea:

Sure enough it was in Ireland, almost certainly it was in County Kerry, at the southwestern shores of this country I love so dearly. It was one of our family holidays and my brother and I snuck out of the house to go to the sea front. We climbed over the grey rocks, waded through brown and yellow algae.

We breathed in and tasted the salt.

And then we exhaled and sang. I can’t remember who started it, but it seems to me that we sang the whole afternoon us against the sea until I realized that it was us with the sea. The words travelled so perfectly on the sea wind, the waves seemed to dance with our melodies and our non-melodies, we sang songs from the Lion King and another I can’t remember. It was great.

We sang until we were exhausted and until my mother came up from the house saying everyone could hear us in the bay. Yes, these news were a little embarrassing because I am sure most of the time we sang out of tune, but I just felt so alive, like we had battled with the sea in the most friendly and harmless way possible.

It was the day when I fell in love with the sea.