The Bird and My Bad Habit

I'm proud of this one

I wasn't going to go home just yet. I wanted a cigarette. I didn't even like them, but they made me feel cool. I didn't know why feeling cool mattered so much to me, because I smoked alone on the beach that no one went to. Sometimes I thought maybe there was someone across the sea, staring at the exact spot on the horizon that I was looking at so we could be making eye contact. I didn't like thinking it was my cliche soulmate - some doe-eyed boy with brown hair and a denim jacket - but another girl like me, smoking a cigarette alone. I thought maybe she was my sister. I decided to go to the beach.

I liked the beach because it was so f*****g loud, and I was so f*****g alone. I could be as loud as I wanted to be. But I never screamed at the waves, usually I would just sing to them. I liked pretending I had a great singing voice. An alluring one - one that would make men watch my lips move and my eyelashes flutter in some seedy nightclub. I could probably do it, if I wasn't so scared to go out all the time and maybe if I didn't like classical music so much. It made sense to me.

I was drawing in the rocky sand with a stick. I drew the first thing I could think of, a heart. I hated myself for it, because it was stupid. It wasn't a cute heart, it was lop-sided and too big. I threw the stick as far away from me as I could, which wasn't very far at all, but it hit the lip of the sea. Then I kicked the heart and smeared it into a gross blotch. I smiled because I thought maybe that was sort of what I looked like. I knew I wasn't ugly, but I liked to make jokes about being ugly, because I liked thinking I was.

I stood up and went to sit on a boulder closer to the water. It was wet, but I didn't care. There was a little brown sandpiper eating something out of the shallow water. I never knew what sandpipers ate. They would run a little bit and then stop suddenly and shove their beaks into the water, like a small and feathery oil rig. I used to think they just ate sand, and I imagined it must taste wonderful to them. 

While I was watching the sandpiper, my cigarette fell out of my mouth and onto some oily seaweed beside me. I could have picked it up and re-lit it, but I wanted to watch it fizzle out on the seaweed. I thought maybe it was meant for the high tide. Or the sandpiper would eat it and get sick or die, which was fine with me. 

Sunrise Sunset by Bright Eyes was stuck in my head. It was just one line though, the one where the lead singer says "it's all about the things that get stuck inside of your head" which I thought was funny. It was a really ominous song, I had always thought. But I liked it for that reason. 

A huge gust of wind came rolling off the water. It was whipping my hair around and spraying salt all over my face, which I knew would piss me off on a bad day, but right now I felt so content I could die. The gust made the cigarette roll off the seaweed and towards the trees behind me. This made my heart twitch with disappointment, because I wanted the ocean to have my cigarette this time. I was watching it roll away and began feeling more frustrated than I thought I would. It stopped rolling once it reached the mashed-up-blotched-heart in the sand. I looked back at the sandpiper as if he were judging me. He wasn't watching me. I looked at the cigarette again and stood up, my shorts wet from sitting down. 

"..All about the things that get stuck inside of your head" I was whispering. I bent down and picked up the cigarette. The end of it was still a little warm. I felt shameful suddenly. I walked right up to the edge of the water, which wasn't too far now since the tide had been rising. I waited and watched a few waves come up to my shoes. My socks were wet and clung to me like I had been running and sweating for so long. I decided I would wait until the water reached my ankles to drop the cigarette.

My mouth was moving but I wasn't thinking. "...Like the songs your roommate sings or a vision of her body..." the water was lapping around the middle of my foot. It was frothy, and the foam looked gross like some fucked up product of a broken coffee maker. The sandpiper was watching me.

It was getting windy again, and the salt was getting in my eyes. I was crying from the salt, and maybe because I didn't want to go home again. "Cause you've changed, yeah you've changed..." I was yelling now. The ocean was halfway up my shins. I hadn't been thinking about my ankles anymore, but I didn't mind that I missed my cue. I let the cigarette go and watched its golden tip recede with the water. It was twirling around like a drowning pixie. I wiped my eyes and watched it for a moment and some, and then turned around and walked towards the trees. 

I wanted to watch it float around for a while, the cigarette. But when my eyes found it again, I also found the sandpiper, and it was chasing what I had let go. My heart sunk to my knees. I thought maybe my sister from across the sea might be disappointed.