‘I just want to say, this was not my idea. Today. It may have been my idea last week, and possibly last year, but it isn’t today, mama. I need to make that very clear.’ A desert is like an ocean, but the waves move slower. Things that have been hidden for centuries reappear piece by piece, and then the wave rolls over it again. It’s a golden sea of sand.

‘Why’s that, buddy?’ Their history is intertwined like this. It has always been diffused by time and effort, but this time would be the correct time, if not the right time, to slowly expose the dreams of the past.

‘I might think I’m hot, but okay, I am not like this one. I need to stress this very loudly, though. I am not that hot, but this one is pretty hot. My mum says I am okay. I think I’m not that great. I am talking a lot this morning, and I don’t know why.’ He sends it through this way, he says, because he sees the young man as himself sometimes, but this one does not need anything extra.

The two besties look at each other. ‘She is throwing him in the deep end,’ the nicer one says. They think of a green pool where everything is so deep one can’t touch the bottom with a stretched out toe, unless they dive. These two cannot dive that deep, and do not know why they would need to come back to the surface if they did.

‘Why are you the nicer one?’ asks the first one.

Last one says. ‘I am the nicest one of all, and she picked me first. That’s all I can say. I am not that hot though, and I am slightly jealous of this one because he was born with that colouring, and I wasn’t.’ He frowns, and kicks at something small and weirdly coloured under the desk he sits at. He had been there for too long now, and wasn’t drifting like he should be. He had left too many people behind and had not thought about how many until it was too late.

‘I had to dye my hair, and this one didn’t. I had to run around naked for a week, not that naked, but not that un-naked either, let me tell you, and anyway, I am not that other one, damn it.’ He says this very proudly, because he has grown fond of his counterpart, despite the anger of fire in the man of air. He had never been this type of man, and had never experienced what this family experienced, and for the opposites they had given him, to see the way they lived, had opened his eyes. Maybe they had opened his eyes too wide, but maybe not. It was just different, that’s all.

He had been thinking about this for a very long time, so had sent the mama a dream where she had seen him in front of a wave. This wave was deep and blue, not golden and not sandy. He had been looking over her shoulder at the one behind her and thought to himself, ‘This guy would catch that wave, cut it up, make it look easy, and come out on the other side laughing. I would be drowning under the wave of blue in that man’s eyes, and hoping mama would come and save me because I can’t swim that well.’

‘Is that what you were thinking?’ The mama was not laughing at him, he knew that now. She was looking at him curiously and wondering if he was okay.

He finds it difficult to explain what he feels when she asks this, not everyone knows this time and this place. Not everyone could see why they interested him. Not everyone would let him be himself, but she would. He knew that from the start, he thinks.

‘I am not that okay,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t need you to look after him for that long. I can look after him, although he would not want me to, he would probably do something that upset me, and then I would run away, because I am not that brave, either.’ He has made himself small and does not remember how to make himself big. He has left himself too many times to remember this was not him today. He had started rethinking a lot of things he had done over the last…

‘How long has it been now?’ she asked him gently.

‘It’s been three years. I have been on this roller coaster for too long, mama. Three years and no one thought to ask me if I was okay. Just you, and my mum didn’t even care. She thought I would be fine, and I am not that fine, and I am not that playful, and I am dreaming of coming to your house and asking you to save me again.’ He says this to himself a lot lately, not too bad, he thinks, not too bad. I can be this party of great people when I come home. Not my home, but this could be just like what I had always dreamed. Not my home though.

He slaps someone’s hand. ‘Bugger off,’ he mutters. ‘I’m not your Ken doll.’ He does not try to understand why these people think he can be touched like this. They just do it, and he desperately wants to leave them. ‘I want to go back to my land, and destroy those who think they can let it be a supermarket world, when it is obviously not. Not this time. I won’t let it happen again.’

Bugger and off were not words he had learnt from the mama. He had learnt to bugger off when he was very small, and throwing people’s clothes in the well because they were not listening to him usually got him a spanking. ‘I am not being kind today either,’ he muttered. ‘They can bugger off and stop touching me. I want to dress myself, and I am perfectly capable of doing that. I am finding this highly amusing though, because you got it exactly right.’

He had sand in his pants, and sand in his sandals, and that would have been funny in any other situation except this one, because sandals did not stop sand from being hot, unless you wore them a certain way. ‘I had to get up very quickly this morning,’ he mutters. He had fallen asleep on the beach.

‘No explanation needed,’ she replied. ‘I am perfectly capable of figuring things out.’

Before he had woken up and turned into a jellyfish of ill-repute he had sent her one last message.

‘I want to keep going mama, I don’t know anymore. I am not like him but I am getting much stronger because of him and I am learning to say things like he does. My mama says I am dreaming of the big lights, and I didn’t think he would be better looking than me, and I was wrong, because I am not that hot, see I said it this time too. Just keep in mind, I didn’t thin out (he is talking about body shape) that bad, though. He is a lot thinner than me, so I guess that’s one thing I have going for me. Not my fault, not his fault, and that’s why I think I’ll get further than him in a running race, and he’ll get distant and then I will get lost in the rest of it and he’ll get better and better. Look, mama, I am writing so much for you now. Are you proud?’

This had been very clever of him. He had compared them by saying he was very good at short distance, and his counterpart would be extremely good at long distance. There were many comparisons here, and perhaps there were many more neither of them had thought of yet.

It’s strange, she thought to herself. I have been proud of this one from the moment I met him, and I don’t know why. But then, she had always been proud of her boys, both of them, and then the next one, and then all of them.

And this was even despite the things they did when they woke up.