Chapter 15 - Chapter Thirteen — Chandré

It's actually been years since I was last on a jet ski, so today was everything. My family left Port Nolloth just after I was born and moved up to Kimberley, but that town on the cold edge of the country is still what I mean when I say home. We go back often, and it has never once felt like a visit. It's a reunion with the elements that made me.

Today the breeze on my face was the kusi and the sky was hung over Nungwi, not McDougall's Bay. And when I went off the back of the boat this morning, the water was warm.

Port Nolloth's sea is Benguela water, dragged up cold from somewhere deep, and it does not care what month it is. Twelve degrees. Fourteen in a generous year. Eina. You go in to your waist and your ribs lock, and you come out blotched purple and shaking and more alive than you have any right to feel. This sea is twenty-eight. It let me in like a bath somebody ran and forgot about, and the shock I was braced for never came.

Everybody keeps telling me how beautiful it is, and it is. But I grew up in a sea that hurts, and one that doesn't feels like it's keeping something back.

It's a sea. It just isn't my sea.

Still, sand and salt water are the only things that have ever put that charge through me, and by the time we had the jet skis out I had it. Spray on my face, water sloshing over my legs, Naz laughing at my back, those sinewed arms caging me in as we rode the swell together. Having him warm and hard behind me was my favourite part of the day.