Dunes

I was sixteen, just after my second year of high school.

My best friend had just returned from two-week holiday by the sea with her parents and brought a souvenir: she’d fallen madly in love with the fitness instructor from the holiday resort.

To her mind there was only one logical next step: we had to go and visit him.

Parents, obviously, were not invited into this plan. The official version was simple and respectable: we’d take a bus to the next town to stay with a girlfriend for two days. Small bags, pyjamas, toothbrushes, “See you on Sunday.”

The real plan started one stop later.

We got off past the town, walked to the main road and stuck out our thumbs.

The resort was almost 270 kilometres away. In our sixteen-year-old logic this didn’t feel insane at all. It felt romantic and slightly heroic.

We hitched rides, changed cars, collected a couple of small adventures along the way, and somehow by evening we really did reach the holiday resort. My friend found her instructor, who looked exactly how surprised you’d expect when two teenagers materialised out of nowhere, uninvited.

Then reality knocked: where are we sleeping?

In our heads the answer was obvious. It’s summer. It’s warm. We’ll sleep on the beach.

When it got dark, we went to the dunes, picked a “secluded spot” (as if we knew what we were doing) and made our camp out of exactly nothing. Jackets on the sand, sweaters over us. That was the entire logistics department.

Around midnight the romantic glow wore off.

It got cold. Not “a bit chilly” cold – deep, damp seaside cold that crawls into your bones. The darkness was full of suspicious noises, each rustle upgraded by our imagination into some gigantic animal. We were suddenly convinced that wild boars were running military operations around our little camp.

We lay there on our makeshift bed, teeth chattering, nerves buzzing, trying to pretend this was still fun.

The highlight of our survival strategy came when we decided our legs were freezing the most. So we pulled our nightgowns out of the backpacks – the same ones we were supposed to wear at the “friend’s house” – and wrapped them around our legs like emergency bandages.

Very glamorous. Very James Bond.

We barely slept. Mostly we lay there waiting for dawn and for whatever was crashing through the bushes not to be interested in girls wrapped in cotton nighties.

When the first light appeared, we greeted it with the kind of gratitude usually reserved for miracle cures. The sun came up, the sand warmed, the dunes looked suddenly harmless, almost pretty. We survived the Night of Great Romance and Questionable Thermoregulation.

Later that day we turned around and went home the same way we’d come: hitchhiking, changing cars, carrying our secret like an extra backpack.

Before going back upstairs to our flats, we stood in front of the block, carefully shaking pine needles and sand out of our nightgowns. Hard to explain to parents how forest debris gets into pyjamas you supposedly wore on a sofa in a nearby town.

They never found out about our little expedition to the sea.

Impossible also exists

This drawing belongs with this frame because both begin with a leap before there is any guarantee.