Down at the beach, dogs chased each other in and out of the sea. A gang of kids burrowed heads-down furiously while their parents sat in a half circle talking and staring at the waves. A pile of students played dead on blankets by the rocks. A café bustled behind where the street gave way to the sand. The boy strolled ahead of me, vivid like sunshine, and the kids looked up in unison, alert as meerkats over their castles, the talk stopped in their parents’ mouths. The students stood up and drifted closer like sleepwalkers, slack-jawed with fascination, blissed out and bleary-eyed. At the edge of the water, he bent down and let his hands trail and circle, crouching low; and where he touched the sea it seemed to shimmer with phosphorescence, every cell in it lit up from within. The dogs splashed through the glimmering water, leaping and barking, surrounding him, challenging him to play. He stood up and the sea-lights flickered out. He moved backward to the line where the wet sand turns to dry, and then he sat down lead-heavy, with a sigh. The sea breathed, and he breathed, and everybody, even the dogs, went completely still. It was the loneliest thing I think I ever saw, the square root of loneliness, him sitting there with nothing moving around him at all, apart from the shifting, dimming water. Lonely warped the air around him, the way heat hangs over tarmac in the summer. It was a visible, wavering thing, clear as day. I thought I knew what lonely was until I witnessed that.

I stood there on the sand behind him, not frozen like the rest of them, immune for some reason, but still, blank with wonder, a clean slate in the shape of a person. I was trying to catch up with what was happening here. I felt as distant as Icarus suddenly, from the things I thought I knew, as far from my certain little life as that farthest single star, nine billion light-years away. The boy turned his face from the water and bit into his apple and the stilled beach started moving again. The dogs thrashed and wrestled in the waves, and the kids and their parents raised their voices in a dispute about the finer rules of their game. Amnesia swept through them like a blizzard. Nobody looked at him again. Nobody noticed. Only me.