Palm Beach, 8 November. It was past ten in the evening and I was ready for sleep when the notifications came on Facebook, people saying the sea was lit. I could have stayed in bed. But there are things that do not come back if one waits for dawn, so I changed and drove to the beach in the dark.
Already on the descent, I saw the waves breaking and the light appearing with them. An intense, electric blue that seemed to come from inside the water and not from above it, in absolute contrast to the cold, moonless night. The glow is from Noctiluca scintillans, a microscopic dinoflagellate that by day can appear as a reddish patch on the surface and at night lights up when disturbed. Each breaking wave agitates millions of these cells, and they respond by combining luciferin with oxygen, transforming their own fright into light. It is a defence mechanism that evolved to frighten what threatens them, and that night on the beach became the most beautiful thing I saw all year.
I stayed for hours. I dipped my feet in the water and the movement drew light, wrote shapes that dissolved in the next instant. Then I sat on a bench and simply watched, the waves beating against the rocks and revealing the blue with each impact. Sometimes the intensity was such that I caught my breath, beauty at the limit of what the body can bear without a name to give it.
Alone, in the dark, before that, I thought I knew the exact chemistry of what I was seeing and yet none of it explained why I could not leave.