This is the spot where –

The moonlight-sequinned sea says There’s something I want to tell you. I walk on, pretending not to hear, fling a pebble at her face, then another, as far as they’ll go. The sea says, Listen to me, please. I want to tell her, Shut your waves up, shut your waves up and leave me alone; I just came here to light a cigarette and moon-breathe, not to talk about the past.

Sunburned tourists sit on van Gogh chairs, rest their elbows on checked tablecloths. I almost choke on the ebb of my memories and their flow. The sea says I didn’t mean it; the sea says I’m sorry, repeatedly.

A-long-time-ago returns, not as the calm moon but as a fierce sun, the sequins now on fire, the skin-peeled, salt-stung, sunscreen-polished tourists on their sunbeds, eyes shut under their umbrellas. Nobody saw anything. Not a single person noticed anything wrong with the world here on the spot where two girls stood. Two best friends dressed in matching bikinis, with matching ponytails and chipped nail-varnish toes, wade in, giggling. There’s a whole sea we can hide in, and the sea asks, Where are your parents? And the sea asks Where? The sea asks are? The sea asks your –