Free write

Seafood. Shrimp, salmon, calamari, octopus, sardines, these are just a few of the sea creatures I love to eat. Some of my earliest memories are at the piers, watching stray cats gut and strip the flesh off of fish left behind for them by the fishermen. The smell of the sea is pungent, briny, and punctuated by diesel engine smoke. My family lived in the subtropical zone of the large island. It's thirty degrees and the sea is an emerald so large and deep. My grandfather always warned us about how the ocean can be dangerous. Beneath the beautiful colours lie currents that pull and push; tides that will lure you out to the trench a thousand kilometres deep, just off the coast of Taiwan.

Since we moved to Canada, I've only seen that emerald colour again once, in the eyes of a white-haired girl I had a crush on in elementary school. She literally had eyes the colour of the ocean that I knew. I told her so, but she turned away, not understanding my broken English. She liked horses, and gave me a hair that she collected from the horse that she says one day she will ride. I never knew whatever happened to that girl, but when I think back on the ocean of my childhood, I see her eyes looking back into mine.