with the currents on the rampage.  Many an unsuspecting vessel has been wrecked off this cove – known by some as Dollar Cove after more than two tonnes of silver dollars were lost from a Spanish galleon of long ago.

How long is it since I last saw him?  It seems but moments and then a lifetime.  I cannot fathom time, for it lengthens and shortens almost on the strength of my whims.  One minute I think I know where I am, and when this is, and the next I appear to know nothing.

I remember seeing him cry.  That was my last sighting.  It was hard, watching from a distance powerless to comfort him.  He was crying because I...

No, not because I had died.  I am alive, aren’t I?  So he must have had some different reason.  There are other, much happier, things that I remember.  There can be no forgetting the depth of love in his eyes as he spoke of perfection: the perfection we shared.  He said we were privileged to experience this, since few people ever did.  He also said that we were two halves of a whole and that for one of us to live without the other would be purgatory.

Now I recalled replying: ‘Without you there could be no life for me … so we’ll never permit a parting, will we?’

With agony in his eyes he responded: ‘No, my beloved … we won’t even let death be an end.  There must be no endings for us.’

My memories are saddening me, as is the sea for some reason, so I waft back to the churchyard and now find myself in front of the ancient bell-tower that seems to sprout from the cliff sheltering it.  How odd that it was built into the cliff instead of onto the church!  Then again, maybe it is not odd.  Who decides what constitutes oddness?

Passing between church and tower I rediscover my gravestone, which I now notice is gratifyingly distinctive.  Taller than I am, and wide, it dwarfs its neighbours and has pillars at either side whereon sit roses so superbly sculpted as to suggest the breath of life.  Likewise the two clasped hands that draw my eyes upwards to the centre of the curved bridge linking the pillars.  Suggestive of having been fashioned from flesh, not stone, one hand is a man’s, the other a woman’s, and on the third finger of each is a ring with a distinctive phoenix symbol.

Acknowledging the woman’s hand as mine, I smile.