My earliest memory of her: a shadowy, ghostly figure treading the darkness like a swimmer, drawing the sheets over me gently as if she covered a sailor in silken waves. My lesson: her waters are moon-cold, clinging, flowing, heavy. They collect echoes.

 

Later, in undersea blurry blackness, I slipped into the strange world of rippled bodies and warped skin. Then suddenly I was being swallowed up, chest compressed, sand in my mouth. Another lesson: her ocean is deep and passionately savage.

 

I tried to teach myself to swim. For hours, I floated and looked: at her waterlogged caresses curved round me, putting forth shining scales. Her eerie silence always suggested an intensifying ache, a pressure beneath the surface.

 

I smiled when she loosened her hair, the tide lapping then frothing at my ankles, horrors brought onto land.

 

I knew from the first moment I saw her how I would sink, sink, sink and drown in her.