“I live alone in London, and normally I go to Michigan to write. But it was November 2020, and I couldn't fly to the States. I was keen to get out of my flat and be with another person, so I decided to go to Croatia with my friend Andy. I went to Austria first, and from there I drove to Zagreb and picked him up at the airport. We made our way south to Omiš, which is in Split, where we'd found this cool little Airbnb. When we got there, it was nighttime. The owner, a lovely man named Neven, met our car at the edge of a cliff, where there were loads of steps, maybe one hundred of them. He insisted on carrying my suitcase—which had six weeks' worth of clothes in it—down the stairs. I think he was surprised by how heavy it was, but he took it in stride. Every three steps he would say, ‘Switch!’ and he would transfer the bag to the other hand. ‘Switch! Switch!’ I remember hearing the water close by, but it was very dark, so we couldn't really see anything.
When I woke up, I went to the balcony and saw that we were the closest thing to the sea. It was stunning; there were all these little boats tied up. Andy took a photo of it, which I used to paint an acrylic a month or two later—only the second painting I'd ever done. We went swimming and found sea urchins, which we cracked open and tasted. Later, we headed farther south, to Dubrovnik. It's beautiful, with all these old buildings, and now it has all these fancy shops. But when we got there, we felt down—we missed our quiet seaside spot and being out of the way of things. We tried to go back to Neven's house, but it was booked, so we looked for any house we could find on the water. The one we found was right on the sea. But this time you couldn't just walk straight over the rocks into the water. You had to jump off a cliff. On the last day, I went for it and leapt in—butt naked. Andy and I have gone to a few spots together over the years, but I felt particularly grateful for this one experience.” —As told to Betsy Blumenthal
Michaela Coel stars in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, now in theaters. Coel won a 2021 Emmy for her writing on the HBO—BBC One series I May Destroy You.
This article appeared in the December 2022 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
