Stars

Sometimes you see the light. And sometimes you see many.

Last night, seven of us stocked up on meat and onions and blankets and marshmallows, and drove to the most beautiful beach we could find; found a spot totally isolated - facing the mountains, jutted against the rocks - without a single footprint, and made as many footprints as we could. We paddled in the water, and we ate bbq steak and chicken until we felt queasy; we took our boards out of our cars, bobbed around in the totally waveless shallows and promptly put them back again; we dragged logs from the nearby wood and built a fire and sat round it, drinking plum wine and beer and toasting chocolate in bananas. We spotted a tiny turtle and followed it until it vanished: we threw a ball around until that did likewise.

And then, when the sun was down and the sky was dark, we sat and we looked at the million stars and we worked out which ones were moving and which ones were planets and which ones were satellites and which ones were planes.

When we had finished staring at the lights in the sky, we all ran into the dark sea and found that the stars had fallen and the water was full of them. Thousands of tiny pinpoints of light were in the dark above us, and thousands of tiny pinpoints of light were flashing around us whenever we moved: clinging to us, bubbling around us, and lighting us all up.

"Oh my God, the stars are in the sea!" somebody - not me - yelled.
"It's glow in the dark plankton. It lights up when it feels a movement because it thinks we're a threat."
"Sugoi!"
"I'm magic! Look at me! I'm magic!"
"I'm like a wizard!"
"Utsukushii!"
"If I shake my wiener it glows in the dark! Look! Look at it!"
"Ahaha."
"Can you see my toes?! It's pitch black and I can see my toes!"
"You've got a star on your nose!"
"Subaraashi, ne?"
"They've all got caught in my chest hair! Check it out! I'm like superman!"
"If you open your eyes underwater it's like you're flying through the sky at night!"
"I think something just stung me."
"This... is..."
"Daisuki."
"A shooting star! I just saw a shooting star!"
"Me too!"
"Oh goddamit. Something just stung me too."
"There's another one!"
"I saw it that time! A shooting star!"
"It's going to land in the sea. All the stars are landing in the sea!"
"It's plankton."
"This is..."
"What life is - "
"About."
"Isn't it?"

And then - when three or four of us had been stung - we fell out of the water and drank plum wine next to the bonfire until everyone had fallen asleep wherever they were sitting.

I took my blanket to a little spot away from the campsite, and lay on it, facing the sea where the sun was coming up. From my side, all I could see were mountains, a ridge of cloud hanging over the lightening sea and - as I nodded off - a rainbow, linking the sky and the sea all over again.

"It is," I told the rainbow. "It is what it's all about, isn't it? Moments like these."
"Go to sleep," said the rainbow.
"Don't be gone when I wake up. Please don't be gone."
"I will be. It all will be." And as I fell asleep, the rainbow added: "When will you learn that that's the point?"

Nights like that don't happen often: where everything is perfect, and everything is beautiful, and everything is magic. And - when they do - you want with all of you to grab them: to hang on to them and never let go. But all of it - the rainbow, the stars, the laughter - is precious because it disappears. Because it will be replaced. By a memory as utterly unexpected and unsought for as the last.

Whenever I lose faith in magic, the world gives it back to me. Whenever I stop understanding what life is about, the world explains it again. And when I woke up this morning and the rainbow and the stars in the sky and the stars in the water were gone, I realised that it didn't matter. That they had done what they had to do: they had given me a perfect moment. One of a life full of many gone, and even more yet still to come.

Moments that make the magic come back again.

Moments full of light.