Juan-Les-Pins

I find myself looking at good times

as the sweet intervals

between fear and longing.

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One of the good times was Juan Les Pins.

Eighteen finally, all six of us

sardined across a single bedroom floor,

sniggering so loud we kept ourselves awake.

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A brace of days

at the end of baked September.

The peak season had been and gone

but the skeletal remains were ours.

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Soon, for some the next week, loomed

University.

For me it hung behind the hillsides,

banished for now, but threatening

to rip them away from me.

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I didn’t ever know how to say

that I didn’t want to go.

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Here,

balanced at the intersection between

being happy

and appreciating how rare that happiness was,

we spent five days leaping from a featureless concrete pier into the sea,

at the zenith of it all.

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*

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Today I went back.

Five years, almost.

Buoyed to cycle 50 scorching kilometres

by a month of impossible fortune,

still feeling the dawn glow of new friends;

still feeling your teeth on my neck;

I sweated and cycled

to a place I hardly knew,

perhaps

mythologized

beyond

recognition?

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Juddering through foreign streets,

no,

past endless hotels, uniform uniform,

no,

sweat-salt eyes stinging;

discount bike lurching;

and

there it was:

I step onto warm concrete

soft with layered sand

and five years fall away,

crumbling into the waves.

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More often than not,

joy

floats above me; it doesn’t sink in

like it used to, it

seeps

into me like a rhyme, seeps

into gaps in a day

like the cracks let the rain

trace tracks down the panes

of a window.

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I took off my clothes.

Left my bike where I hoped no one would steal it

ran the length of the pier,

outstripped by my eighteen-year-old self,

and leapt

into aquamarine.

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I knew I’d never be this happy again.

I knew that.