When they arrived she was always pale, her skin dry and ashen. I watched her grow up this way, in cycles of contracted presence followed by long spans of absence. For a brief time each year we belonged to each other, then she left the sea tanned and was gone for months, and the Gabi who returned was not the Gabi who had left, but a paler, older girl, who carried within her a world I couldn’t see and could only guess at by the changes in her.
