The morning after the storm, I walked along the shore looking for anything good that might have been washed up in the westerly gales: driftwood or treasure. I found one unusual piece of flotsam - a seal, on the other side of the fence from the sea, perhaps carried by a huge wave. A young straggler, blown off course.
I've washed up on this island again, eight and a half months sober, worn down and scrubbed clean like a pebble. I've got a fresh start but I'm not sure what to use it for. Back home, at the end of a rough year, in the winds that shaped me and where the sea salt left me raw. I've spent nights in the caravan at the farm, an exposed location on the Atlantic coast. In the storms the whole place shakes and the windows rattle but I'm safe in the glow of my laptop.
I've been trying to remember my last drink. It must have been the dregs of someone else's, picked up at the end of the night in a room above a pub in south London, as I stumbled around desperately. Then I got in a taxi I couldn't afford and when it got near my house, ran and hid from the driver in the walkways of a Bethnal Green estate, heart pounding. I don't do shameful, uncivillised, thrilling things like that anymore.
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