Loui, Loui, Loui.

I always thought 'go to your happy place' was a turn of phrase, but it's real.

                                                                                 *

The sun had dropped off the edge, but there was still an orange glow radiating up through the dusk over the horizon.

I was facing the ocean with Loui wrapped around me like a baby monkey. She smelled like one too; my sticky bundle of sand and Japo-Singhala (Japalese? Singhanese?).

She asked her mother something, her mother said something back. Suddenly Loui fainted and hung limp in my arms.

"She's asking if her purple eye shadow still on. I tell her it's finish, now she's shock," her mother explained. Tenderness flowed up from my tummy and out of my throat in a chuckle.

I lay back on a sun-lounger with her sitting on my belly. The orange glow framed her sweaty head like a halo. Her long hair kept getting trapped under her armpits. The waves roared ever so gently.

I showed her how to do the Native American call by patting her mouth, she tried doing it back to me by smacking my face.

We babbled to each other in our own spaghetti language, tickled and poked and we laughed so much.

We spent an hour like this, but they say time is relative.

When I close my eyes we're back there on that sun-lounger, never ever and forever.