How I Miss the Sunsets

Short Hypnogogic Disappearances

22 January, 2026 Nicoya, Costa Rica

I Always Swim With My Eyes Open

The morning ocean is a drowsy, soft thing that envelops me. It lifts me gently so that I am under and over the water simultaneously, so that the sun burns a constellation into my body.

Whilst in this great green ocean, memories drift in. And poems. Imagined journal pages fill up — page after page. I exhale and swim along the bottom like some kind of sea creature gathering words or nutrients until I run out of stored breath and rise up. I always swim with my eyes open. At the surface — one, two, three, four, five yellow rays press through — like so many children’s drawings of the sun.

Out of the water I’ve forgotten the words I’d desperately willed myself to remember, like willing the memory of a dream for morning in the night. Mostly I hoped to carry with me the rhythm of the rippling water, each undulation cradling a sentence, a fragment, a word. I rise up at the water’s edge and they slip away, that dreaded and expected shedding. How many stories has the sea swallowed?

I realise I have to swim more, more so that the words grow onto me and into me like barnacles. So that I know them so well the telling becomes automatic and slip from my pen onto the page.

For now, I am grateful to explain their disappearance. Perhaps that’s all there is.

In the afternoon the ocean is wild. It sucks me in and spits me out. A wave pushes me under. I rise and I open my mouth for a long inhale but a second wave erupts and heaves itself inside me

“Now you have it.”

Now I have it.

People gather on the beach. No longer alone, I collect my things, and — sandy, salty, sticky, and sloshing — begin the climb and descent back to my cabin beneath the monkeys. I realise the next morning that they are gathering for the sunset.

This is how I miss the sunsets.

Treasure

Scribbles

Hermit Crab