...writing about leaving The Edge Of The World. I'm not entirely sure why this is. Maybe it's because the last time I displaced, it was a bit more dramatic. This latest move seems wholly anticlimactic. Plus, I'm not relocating as far. You don't really say goodbye to friends that you're only moving a couple of hours away from.
Or possibly I'm unwilling to fully accept that I've moved to yet another place for a significant period of my life, and that things simply haven't worked out. I had the closest thing to an ideal job for a while, but it couldn't be sustained. I didn't find love. Or, arguably, I did - just with the wrong person. I am leaving no richer, no more fulfilled - just a little older and slower.
Perhaps I am being harsh. I have made some great friends. I have learned to fish. I have spent a whole lot of time doing nothing in a place that is pretty sleepy and stress-free. I have slipped into a comfort zone. At times, it was almost like having some of my eventual retirement on loan.
On the last weekend of officially living at The Edge Of The World, I got back very late one night. It was wild outside, and the windows in our living room had blown wide open in the wind. I decided to join the seafront for a constitutional nightcap. It was five in the morning, the waves were thrashing against the sea wall, and the throb of the sea was illuminated by an almost full moon. It was eerie and enchanting. Rocks and water were being hurled across the orange road at certain points. It was putting on a show, seemingly all for me.
At high tide, you occasionally observe a phenomenon where waves rebound, causing a backwash. So you get waves going both in and out. Some of these rebounding waves slip away under the radar without incident. Some of them collide with incoming waves, causing water to jet into the air. Some such collisions that evening were causing splashes that must have leapt up a good twenty-five foot. A friend of mine told me that this effect is called a clypotis; although I have uncovered no evidence that this is in fact so. However, I would like it to be.
I have tried to slip away unnoticed to a certain degree. But a decent amount of folk have fondly teased me that I will never get away from The Edge Of The World. I get a feeling they don't want me to. I even got a hug from a woman working in the local Londis. It feels like I am missed. Which is consolation, I guess. Although things haven't concluded in the way I might have hoped, at least sometimes in our comings and goings we collide spectacularly for fleeting moments, before breaking apart and subsiding anonymously once more into the sea.
