Having a Bad Day

With my walking stick, I stumble through tide pools and dry stalks in ocean brine.  Beside me, the ocean shuffles white over green, dark over oyster beds.   Late sunlight struggles down through a talus of clouds.

I am hated by fiddler crabs scurrying click-clack over yellow strokes of wet sand, and I am no hero to the terns unwinding the blue threads of sky.

Listen, I am not wrong about the world being against me.  The sales clerk at my pharmacy winks at everyone but me.  On my last visit, she smashed by box of Band-Aids.

And there is more.   My boss forced me to a remote corner of the office.  “You lack zest,” he says.

I don’t know “zest.”

Walking slowly and without direction makes sense to me.  Sand, cumulous cloud, rafts of driftwood: these things are liquid.

The dull roar of miles of waves breaking against shore is the sound of me letting go.

—Mitchell Hegman