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In a couple of hundred years this town will sink beneath the sea, and fish will eat our bones.
Either that, or there will be a city here instead.
When the sun sets over the bay it falls on a multitude of windows, each one holding as much light as it can, while the surplus sinks into the shadows behind the skyscrapers.
You can’t walk the path through the woods any more; the little church has been supplanted by gleaming harbourside appartments, and, further back from the water, a series of ornate courtyards. A shopping complex crowns the hill.
Crowded up in the valley, the bungalows have become tower blocks. They wear the same cloak of poverty, but it is stained, it is vibrant with the grit and grime of the city. The sleepy footsteps of the aged are lost in the echoes of a thousand restless children, caged within the city, set free by its streets.
You can smell the sea when the rain comes, and in the petrol fumes, and in the fish markets. When you walk onto the quay you look out and see the metropolis spread before you like a jungle, crowding at the estuary. The sunset in the windows blinds your eyes. The smell of the sea fills you up.
It is night. The streetlights pollute the sea, turn it to bile, and when the tide goes out, the mud stinks with untamed excess. Time to go home. Time to find home, when every home is the same and the faces don’t know you at all, and the smell of the sea comes in with the rain.
In a couple of hundred years, this town will belong to nobody, and the waves will slowly forget us.
