I spent the day in the water, bobbing about in the cold with the company of a few other brave souls. It was good to be back at my local break, cutting a line across familiar green water, filling my lungs with air that tastes somehow like home. I spent too long in the water, as I often do, and as my surfing partners one by one gave up and paddled for shore I felt a weight within my chest begin to gently fall away and disappear beneath the shifting surface, sinking slow like the sun into the distant horizon. 
I’m due to go out, soon - called away to the birthday party of a friend at some bar I’m not quite cool enough to know how to pronounce properly. But for now I’m in bed, warm and moving slow, fresh from the shower and listening to Ludovico Einaudi pull a little music from a piano. I spent the day doing something I love, and in a few hours I’ll be surrounded by the light and sounds of social living, but it is this brief moment, here and now, that I enjoy the most. It is small and simple, with clean sheets and a soft sort of weariness that comes on with a warm weight, like getting drunk on good red wine. The dog snores softly in the corner, the phone is off the hook, rain falls on the windowpane and my heart beats oh-so slow.
It isn’t perfect. But it’s close.