Julia Armfield

It’s just another way of thinking you’re special, the way everyone does when they’re a teenager. You think you aren’t able to love, except that of course you are. You think you aren’t able to love correctly or the same as everyone else, except that of course you are, you just haven’t had a chance to do it yet. You’re not special, you’re just waiting.

I’m aware, by now, that this kind of talk isn’t really meant for me, but is simply a conversation she can’t help having, the result of questions asked in some closed-off part of her head

Did you know that until very recently, more people had been to the moon than had dived beyond depths of six thousand metres? I think about this often – the inhospitableness of certain places. A footprint, once left on the surface of the moon, might in theory remain as it is almost indefinitely. Uneroded by atmosphere, by wind or by rain, any mark made up there could quite easily last for several centuries. The ocean is different, the ocean covers its tracks

Panic is a misuse of oxygen

An hour back in again at night, her clothes salt-glazed, her skin scoured smooth by coastal weather. Strange, to live in such proximity to an ocean that I almost never see

She is looking at me seriously now. I think about my own mouth, imagine it filled with things that have no business being there – ghost groans of words that died before my tongue could shape them.

We were both small, though I was specifically short and Leah specifically skinny

She didn’t often wear dresses, though when she did it always seemed she chose the ones that looked like something else: cocoons and folded paper, carapaces, wetsuits, wings. Like an insect that mimics something else, at a distance it could often be hard to tell quite what it was that you were looking at

Prior to this point, I had never been keen on the water, imagining only preying dark places and ocean floors that dropped suddenly away

To know the ocean, I have always felt, is to recognise the teeth it keeps half hidden.