Zeebrugge, March 6th 1987, 7PM

After a cloudy but perfect day in Ostend, my best friend Joni and I, sat on a bench on the sundeck of the "Herald of Free Enterprise". On the other end of the bench was our friend David. The Communards blared from the headphones of his walkman, while he attempted to light a cigarette behind his hand, which was nearly impossible in a seawind this time of year, but I wasn't going to tell him that.

Joni's brother Eric and his girl Lily, wrapped in camouflage green parkas, were hanging over the railing, shouting profanities at seagulls like the nineteen-year-old arseholes they were.

Joni shuffled a set of postcards through her hands. Paintings of exotic animals in human forms and spooky masks in pastel colors. "Thanks for coming with me to the James Ensor House," she said, her eyes lit with passion as her gaze trailed over her newly acquired art collection, "I suppose I owe you a few beers."

I dug my hands a little deeper into my Wranglers, dying to tell her that a drinking match with our friends in the finest of pubs couldn't best an hour of alone time with her. I would've accompanied her to the dump, if that was where she wanted to go.

But I was a coward. I smirked my feelings away. "You had the sweets." I pointed at the paper bag in her lap. She smiled and dipped her hand in. Out came a Babelutte, one of Ostend's delicacies. She twisted both sides of the white and blue wrapper, took the toffee chunk out and put it between my lips. My breath hitched when her fingertips touched my mouth.

What was she doing? I was quite capable to open my own candy wrapper, thank you very much. She lingered, her eyes drawn to the meeting of her hand and my skin, and her own mouth dropped in a little O, as if ... oh ... she suddenly realized what she was doing and she sensed the fireworks she was sending straight down to my dick, and how maybe this was not something "just friends" did, or maybe they had done so before, but now that one of us was straying from that "just friends" - path, it didn't feel that safe anymore.

Love is friendship that has caught fire, my grandpa used to say, but he forgot to mention how to avoid getting burned. We were neighbours. I had known Joni my entire life. I didn't even remember when or how my feelings for her evolved, but lately, my hormones had been a raging inferno whenever I touched, saw, smelled or even just let my mind wander towards her.

Joni's eyes liked to hide behind her blonde, feathered bangs, but I could write an essay about them anyway. They were bright blue. Sometimes they were dreamy like a cornflower swaying in the breeze. The next moment, they looked keen like a cut sapphire in which every minuscule detail of her surroundings was reflected. These were the moments to watch out for, because there was no saying what she would do or say next, only that it would blow you away.

Joni smelled like the sweets she carried in her pockets and the library books in her tote bag. She was a disaster with calculus. Worst driver ever. Had won every board game she ever played. She called me Arthur with a stubborn persistence while others carelessly shortened it to Art.

She was my best friend. I had to tell her how I felt, yet there was no way I could.

I closed my lips around the tiny sugarbomb planted in my mouth and pulled away from her, savoring the rich toffee while the ship underneath us roared to live. We would be sailing off soon.

Casual, as if nothing happened, Joni stuffed the sweets away and resumed admiring her cards. Humming along with David's music, she folded her legs onto the bench and dropped her head to my shoulder. Her hair tickled my chin and her warmth radiated through my clothes. The rhythm of her breathing was tangible, while my own heart rate seemed missing. This friend thing had to stop. I couldn't deal with this any longer. "Joni? Joni, uhm, do you have a minute? I need to speak to you ... like alone maybe?"

Lily's whining drowned out my words. "I'm freezing!" The ship had left the dock and as it picked up speed, so did the wind.

Eric snagged her around her waist and rested his chin on her shoulder. "Yeah halfwits, come on! Let's head down to the bar! Four more hours to get pissed, woohoo!"

Joni looked at me inquisitively, with that razorsharp sapphire gaze, and I realized that Lily just saved me from disaster. I could've ruined everything. Joni would never casually sit with me again if she knew about the number of times I undressed her in my mind.

"Arthur promised his father some duty free booze. I was about to go with him," Joni declared, looping her hand around my arm. "We'll meet you in the bar when we're done."

The five of us shuffled inside. A sickening waft of fried food and perfume welcomed us to the lounge area. I held the door for a family of four. The mother carried a sleeping toddler on her arm. She looked spent, eyes drooping and hair in disarray. Daytrippers like us, I reckoned. I wouldn't be surprised if they too had saved coupons from "The Sun" to get day tickets for a pound, too cheap to resist.

With his hands shoved deep into his pockets, Eric bumped his shoulder against mine. "First the museum, now the shop. You're missing out on all the fun today. Why is that?" He twitched his eyebrows in a demonic Mick Jagger sort of way.

"Leave him alone." Lily slapped him on the back.

"Not to worry, you'll see us before you see the bottom of your pint," I said to Eric, trying to keep my cool.

"Whatever." He walked a few steps backwards as our paths split ways. He smiled, but it wasn't a relaxed smile. He was trying to tell me something. Something like ... I know the things you're thinking about my sister and they disgust me.

"Jerk," Joni muttered when he finally turned.

"Yeah, what was that all about, huh?" I kicked my foot into the stuffy solid carpet and let Joni pull me towards the kiosk. It was jam packed with every possible brand of liquor, cigarettes and perfume. I grabbed my dad's 'J&B'. "You need something?" I turned to her, a nervous flutter in my stomach.

"Not really." Her hand trailed a line of boxed chocolates aimlessly. "I figured you had something to say? Something only for me? You said ..."

I feigned ignorance. I was a total dick. Her cheeks colored as she gauged my reaction. "Forget it, it's nothing, the cash desk is over there."

I slouched behind her, thinking of ways to fix this, to make this right. There was a time when being around her was easy, when I never had to think about what to say or how to say it. Why couldn't I think of anything? I reached for a box of Raiders on the shelf, knowing she adored the combination of chocolate and caramel. "Hey, Joni?"

"Dammit, these vibrations." She grabbed the counter, not seeing what was in my hand. "They make me nauseous."

I put the box back and noticed how the items on the shelf rattled. "It's worse than this morning," I agreed, "Opposed current and wind direction maybe?" It was a mere guess. I had no idea.

I paid for my stuff. Joni looked pale. Somehow, I felt guilty. "Wanna hold on to my arm?"

Before Joni could take it, the ship jolted violently. She looked up, her eyes wide. I opened my mouth to tell her all was fine when a second jolt made her fall over.

"Arthur!"

The next second, the entire world flipped upside down. Joni was flung away from me. My legs were kicked from underneath my body by an invisible force. I slid down the floor until my back nearly broke against a hard surface. The stab of pain was fierce but short. I blinked my eyes. The hard surface that had stopped me was the bar. Everything that had been horizontal was now standing up and vice versa.

The ship had capsized.

Around me, bottles and boxes sailed through the air. All that liquor and perfume. Was nothing on this ship tied up? Human bodies somersaulted the space like rag dolls.

The noise was deafening. The ship's metal groaned, people screamed, debris cracked, clinked and shattered. One man cried out as he crashed through a glass panel an arm length away from me.

Water burst through the portholes and deck doors. I scrambled to my feet. "Joni!"

The lounge floor had now become the wall of our fast filling deathtrap and men, women and children were thrown on a heap on the much smaller sidewall or got trapped on solid objects in between, like the bar I was standing on.

The water started rising and bodies floated upward ... dead, dying or struggling.

I frantically spun around on my feet to look for Joni. About ten meters away, near the currency exchange office drifted something orange, Joni's coat, and then a glimpse of her blonde hair. My heart raced. "Joni!" To my relief, her hand shot up and waved. It was really her.

Then the lights went out.

Panic set in while water grabbed its icily cold hands around my ankles and moved further up, seeping into my clothes, stabbing my skin. I peered into the dark, waiting for my eyes to adjust while calling her name, but so many people were screaming, it felt useless. When the water came up to my chest, my body started floating too. A female voice next to me rattled a Hail Mary.

We were all going to drown.

I started moving in the direction that I thought I remembered seeing Joni, but had a hard time orienting myself. The thought of her dying scared and alone, pushed me forward. I had to find her.

I couldn't swim. Too much wreckage cluttered the water. I pulled myself from one object to the next, not always sure what exactly I was holding in my hands. I tried not to think about it, the smell of food, waste, people and their bodily fluids making me sick.

At some point, my hands detected a life vest, but after I got my first arm in, it was torn from me and with it, my head was pulled underwater. When I managed to come up for air, gasping and howling, there was no trace of the vest and whoever had taken it from me, which was not surprising. I still couldn't see beyond my own nose.

Over and over, I called out her name, until I heard my own and my heart skipped a beat.

"Art? Thank God, it's Art!" It was David's voice. His hands found my face and pulled me close enough to make out his features. "Where's Joni?" he asked.

"I've lost her. I don't know what to do. Where's ..."

Another body latched onto mine, and for a moment I feared somebody was pulling me under again.

"Give him a vest first," David said, and then I heard her crying. Lily, and the words that broke my heart.

"Eric is dead."

I breathed hard while David forced a vest on my body and Lily clung to me, her body shaking from cold and grief. My body turned numb. Eric the invincible, my friend, our rock, he was gone.

The ship groaned with an overwhelming roar. The sound came to a halt and the water stopped rising.

"We've stopped sinking." I heard somebody say. "A sandbank," said another. We were flung to the painful realm of hope once more.

"We're not going to drown," David said, "We'll be okay."

"We'll freeze," I hissed, "Look around, listen." People around us had become remarkably calmer already. Hypothermia.

"We're going to get Lily out." David grabbed my vest and shook me. "We have to. For Eric."

"Of course," I said, not believing we could, but I was willing to die trying. I was dying anyway.

In the distance, maybe twenty or thirty meters away, a faint light came down a window overhead and a rope was lowered through. "A rescue crew." I pointed. The three of us waded through the puddle. Holding on to each other's vests, we resembled a small island.

"A baby," Lily muttered when we passed a mother and child. The baby lay crying on a life vest, sheltered by the woman's arms. Her head rested on her elbow, motionless.

"Ma'am, come with us, there's a rescue team over there." I pinched her arm, but no reaction came. Without thinking, Lily and I grabbed the vest and pulled that new island along with our own.

By the time we reached the rope, rescue teams were winching people up. We could see more window openings now and more ropes. A harness came down and we pulled it under the woman's armpits so the rescue workers could lift her out.

Seconds later, an angry voice shouted down, "No dead bodies! The living first!"

Again, something broke inside me. Against better judgment I had held on to the hope that the woman was unconscious but still alive. That the baby in Lily's arms would have a mum. They were hoisted up next.

Suppressing my tears, I scanned the area, which was easier now some lights were let down. I recognized the currency exchange office. That's where I'd seen Joni before the lights went out. I knew I would never heal from this if I didn't do everything I possibly could to find her. "Will you take care of Lily?" I grabbed David's wrist. He gave me a tight hug and I returned into the darkness.

An increasing number of people couldn't be bothered anymore, desensitized by the hypothermia. I tried to direct an old man to the windows, but he laughed. "It's okay, love, I'm fine." He drifted on top of a corpse, surrounded by more dead bodies, but had a smile on his face. I left him, another piece of me breaking, but I left him to find Joni.

My voice was nearly gone from calling her name and so was the feeling in my hands and feet. As my body grew numb, my mind started flirting with acceptance. I had to remind myself over and over again that Lily and David had escaped, and that it was still possible for Joni and me.

From one of the windows, a ladder was lowered. People who still had some fight in them left, rushed to the scene. That's when I saw her. In the beam of light, her orange coat was the first to mount the ladder.

"Joni!"

I startled her. Her body froze as she looked around to find me. In that same moment, a man grabbed her leg and pulled her down to climb over her back. She disappeared into the scrambling mass of desperate souls. People who had nothing to lose and everything to gain. They would drown her.

I gathered my strength, pushing everything out of my way, not caring whether it was human or thing, alive or dead. That crazy, orange coat surfed up with Joni, my Joni, kicking, screaming and fighting. I pushed my fist through the crowd and grabbed her collar. "Joni, this way." I pulled her out and into my arms. "Joni, oh my God, Joni." I raked my numb fingers through the stiff, icy strands of her hair.

"Arthur, you fool," she whispered, grabbing my face in both hands. "Will you tell me now?"

"What?"

"That thing you wanted to talk to me about, alone? I know you didn't forget. I swear to God, Arthur, if you lie about it one more time." She had never sounded more furious.

"Joni, please. We gotta get out of here. This is not the time."

She turned my face from the apathetic on our left to the desperate on our right. "If this is not it, then when is?"

"Joni," I begged, "Joni," trying to remove her hands from my face, but she wouldn't let go. With the stubbornness of a mule, she pressed her forehead against mine, pressed and pressed until it hurt. Her hands dug into my flesh and her tears hit my wrists.

The face of Eric, her brother, flashed through my memory, the boy next door that was my friend, the boy I had loved, and the shitty way our paths had parted the last time I saw him. My shoulders shook as I broke down and cried with Joni.

With a voice, hoarse as a seagull, I croaked, "Joni Walters, I love you. I'm head over heels, desperately and madly in love with you."

"I know," she said, "I love you too," and she pressed her shivering lips against mine. "Now, we can get out of here."

At 20:10, five minutes after Joni, I was hauled out of the shipwreck of the Herald of Free Enterprise, leaving shards of my heart inside, shards that would never resurface, but knowing that one of the better parts of my heart had survived and would help me to live on.

It was Joni who saved me that day and not the other way around. It was Joni who took that horrendous moment, and from all the brokenness inside, drew a simple rule to live the rest of our lives by.

If you love someone, you've gotta tell them while you still can.

Love is too vital to postpone.

Just do it.

Tell her now.