The first time I understood that water could have a personality and be so vastly different, I was floating on my back on the coast of Anguilla, arms flung wide, doing absolutely nothing, and quite proud of myself.
As I floated, the sea held me the way a great hotel bed would, the water was as beautiful as sinking into a tepid bath, and the colour you see looks as if it was invented by someone in marketing (a beautiful and striking shade of turquoise that looks lit from within), I remember thinking, “so this is what everyone means.”
The Caribbean forces you to relax. The water makes sure you stay to watch the horizon, have long conversations with friends and wile away an afternoon. The colour palette runs from gin-clear at your ankles to a jade so saturated it looks digitally enhanced, then, further out, to that famous open-hearted blue that has sold more real estate than any broker alive. And there is nothing behind it, and I mean that as the highest praise the Caribbean can be paid. It’s a totally uninterrupted horizon with no cliffs, no crumbling tower, no cypress leaning in. It’s rum, reggae and sunsets.
Then there is the other blue. The one that doesn’t care whether you relax. The Mediterranean is colder than you expect, and it wants you to know it. You wade in off a shelf of white limestone in Milos, or from a slip of pebble beach beneath the almond trees in Puglia, and the dialogue goes as such, ‘Ok ok ok I can do it, I can do it’ before you dare to plunge your whole body in to acclimatise to the temperature. But this is a sea that has watched three thousand years of arrivals and departures. The blue is deeper, more sapphire where the Caribbean is jade, and in the coves of the Amalfi coast, the water goes almost black beneath the cliffs. What the Mediterranean has, and what the Caribbean can never have (which is also a beautiful thing), is context. You are swimming below a Saracen tower, past a chapel the colour of bone, within sight of terraces that have grown lemons since decades were letters not numerals. In Hydra you climb down from a house with no cars and no road and lower yourself into the exact water Leonard Cohen looked at while he became himself.
The best (and coldest) swim of my life ended not on a sugar beach, but on hot rocks that scorched my feet, and I had to climb, dripping to a terrace where a man I’d never meet again poured me my go-to drink, the spicy margarita of course, and said nothing, because the view said all of it. I particularly enjoy that rhythm that the Mediterranean day offers – the swim, the shade, the long lunch, the second swim, the passeggiata.
So here is my confession. Everything I’ve said about the Mediterranean is true, and I could go on. It is the more beautiful argument, the more cultured company, and from the sea, you are looking at stories and histories of books you’ve wanted to read. But admiration is not the same as love. My heart, it turns out, lives on the other side of the Atlantic, in the warmer water. The Mediterranean has a well written manuscript three thousand years deep, but the Caribbean hands you a blank page, and sometimes that’s all you need. I have come to understand that a blank page is not emptiness, but it’s permission, because it allows my mind to rest, and has also allowed my mind to think, as well as to readjust my thinking. And I love that you can get that from just floating in the Caribbean waters. That afternoon off Anguilla, I thought the sea was telling me to relax, but along with relaxation, it also gave me clarity, understanding a whole lot of truth that I was looking for.
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