Hungry, lonely, and scared, afraid not just of the dogs down below that had nipped and yapped at my shins, nor the red ants scurrying up and over my trembling thighs, I sat in silence watching what seemed a whole half world stretched out before me.

There was noise from the dogs, and flutters from the chickens, and slight murmurs from the unseen who lived just out of sight behind the palm canopy, steadily going about their business as though absolute terror and sheer beauty weren’t just a hair’s breadth away, as both were very much for me.

It was, I would later learn, a time like that which brings everything into a clear, ice cold sharp focus: The sudden gelling of a thousand mistakes, a hundred regrets, some half-hearted feelings of being wronged; of brain mathematics finally adding everything into a sickly, yet palatable, understandable, and unavoidable conclusion.

Any distraction will do – and a distraction that manifests itself in the shape of a horizon that sears into your eyes from left to right, earthy hues of bright orange turning a flat sea into fire, with a six-mile stretch of completely deserted sand gently coaxing it in, certainly does just that.

But a distraction is indeed only that: No matter where you run or hide, be it another’s arms, the bottom of a bottle, the other side of the world, you take everything else along with you like skin.

It took a friend who was then very much a stranger to put that focus into place. Afterwards, we climbed down from that majestic rock sitting sullenly on the edge of the world, and set about putting things right.

The one thing satisfying about mournfully watching a sunset on a beach, is you can guarantee someone else the most beautiful daybreak.