Tracey Emin: My Life In A Column

I lay in bed with the covers scrunched up in my hands, tightly pulled to me underneath my chin. I was trembling with fear, panicking that I had not made the right decision.

I looked around me and tried to make sense of the shapes in the darkness. A concrete room, part of a concrete house. I still wasn't sure that I had made the right decision. And then I heard the sound of the ocean and the mighty roar and I knew this was it. The two wooden doors were not going to hold back the wave. My heart was pounding uncontrollably. Did I have time to get to another room? At least if I was going to die, maybe I should die with someone else. Or was it better to die in a dignified way, alone in my singular concrete tomb?

I might not die – the wave might just carry on going. The concrete might withstand the power and the force. I just lay there and shook, knowing that it was coming nearer and nearer and nearer.

And then, of course, I woke up. Switching on the light next to me, I saw the shapes and apparitions of two giant crabs making their way up the mosquito net. A few days earlier I had given myself the choice of crabs or people, people or crabs. Due to my state of mind I wisely chose the crabs – and now, in the early hours of the morning, they scuttled on the net, resembling some kind of malevolent Victorian hand-crocheted curtain.

I wasn't quite as afraid as I had been before, because this time I regarded the crabs as more a nemesis than an enemy and the reality of the situation was that the crabs were here a long time before me. I lay there thinking and thinking and thinking until my brain felt like it was going to explode. My right eye had the feeling that someone had placed a fork in it. I felt very uneasy about the dream and had somehow managed to get myself completely stressed out.

By the time daylight came I had managed to give myself an intense headache. I walked along the shoreline trying to shake it off. This place is incredibly beautiful. The ocean is so many different colours. Not just blues and greens but golds and oranges; tangerine light bouncing just beneath a flat, shallow wave, the millions of crabs scuttling along the shoreline daring to go in and out of the waves. Most of the crabs are pink and the water is generally an aquamarine blue.

So, as the light hits, I'm filled with nostalgia for my childhood, just the colours, the pink and the blue. I have done nothing for days, just walking and swimming. And thinking. Thinking with huge intensity.

Oh, I forgot to mention: I am the only guest here. A strange predicament, to be alone in paradise. But that is exactly how I wanted it. I wanted to be in a place where there's no confrontation, no idle gossip, and where I could be completely in control.

This place should be full right now. It's high season, it should be a honeymooner's delight. But it's empty. People are too afraid to come – and who can blame them? In parts of Kenya, babies are being raped and burnt alive. There's hysteria on the streets and a complete confusion of law and order.

I'm perched somewhere near the Somalian border. Not a place known for 100 per cent safety, but nevertheless a long, long way away from the effects of the recent elections. Even so, the economy of Kenya for the foreseeable future is well and truly fucked. A country that relies so heavily on tourism will take a long time to recover. And it is a sad fact that Kenya is well and truly stuck as a Third World country. And Kenya was one of Africa's great hopes.

Clearly I don't have much to say this week. I can go into long descriptions of the milky sandy beaches and the cute naughty monkeys and the beautiful puffy, purple twilight cumulus and pink stratus clouds that surround me – all of this stuff that I just see.

This last week has been strange. I feel that I am very solid and everything is just floating around me. Almost like it almost isn't really there, like this is all a dream. Which it very well could be. I am stuck alone on a desert island. My only salvation is chess. I have taken to playing with the proprietor. And it has made me very, very happy.

I haven't played chess since 1992. And that was against Carl Freedman's computer. It kept informing me that I was attempting to play the Sicilian Defence. The time before that, I was in Turkey, I was 23, wild, insane and madly in love. I was in love with someone who was as insane as me.

He's dead now; he was blown up by dynamite. Sometimes I dream of him; I dream we are on his fishing boat and we are sailing in the middle of a giant sea, and underneath us silently moves the hump of a giant wave and he explains to me that this is the beginning of something big. And he's right, it is. The dead are full of wise words.