  It’s summer. It’s summer and I’m at the beach. I’m running. Only in my bathing suit, my sneakers, and my sunglasses, I’m running to free myself. To hurt myself to make something better out of it. I pass cute girl after cute girl, and each time it’s love at first sight.
Each time it’s a tragic departure. An exchange of glances. That’s all they consist of. This is the first day I’ve gone to the beach all year, and everything is so perfect. Everything around me is perfect. Each little world I pass by, I get little splices of people’s lives.
These aren’t highlights or excerpts. These are real people talking about real topics and enjoying their day at the beach. I run past current events. I run past political debates. I run past jocks throwing a beat up football back and fourth. I run past lovers lost within each other.
I run past every little snippet of life’s fruit, as well as its discontent. I haven’t run in weeks. My body is out of shape, but it’s hard to notice. My hair is all frizzy and hasn’t been cut in what seems like forever. I got a chance to shave this morning, so I don’t look like a complete bum. I run back to my family and we exchange a few words before I take off my shoes, and go running after my sister and my uncle’s sister in the water admiring the seashells in the water.
They look so innocent and unsuspecting as I dive at them, hurling my sweaty body at the refreshing water. Splash. Everything turns to blue as I lunge into the huge body of water. I’m so hot and out of breath, and my lungs begin to shrink. The cold water is adding pressure to my hot lungs. I feel like I have peanuts for organs.
Up to my neck in blue, I push off and keep my head afloat. It’s so refreshing it hurts, and I try to laugh at myself. I hang with the kids, because I love kids. Children don’t have hidden motives or unsure sexual feelings, so it feels like a true conversation to me. Talk to my uncle or his brother, and they could tell you how pretty everything is, or how satisfied they are with their white color jobs- but they’re trying to tell me how they’d love to spread that blonde with the black bikini and demolish their insides. How they can’t wait to get home to play that latest video game with the new “detachable limbs” feature.
Civilization has sterilized us of our primal instincts. Sure it looks good on the outside, but people never went on murderess rampages two-hundred years ago. At least that’s what I’m imagining that they’re thinking of. Hanging with the kids, talking about stupid little things like sports or tricks to pull on their teacher, my lungs start to expand and I’m thinking of nothing but simplicity. I lean back and close my eyes, and everything seems to make sense. I’m not thinking about shoving anything down the cute girl’s tube as she walks by with her friend.
I’m not thinking about how I’m going to make some cash together for my feeble little high school life. I’m not thinking about swiping a few beers later. I’m only thinking about what age I stooped playing soccer and started specializing in nothing. We’re collecting shells, and I’m thinking about making a few for some friend’s back at home. Maybe a necklace or a bracelet will help buffer the wall of hard work that’s coming at the end of the month. I can’t believe I’m going back to fucking school next month.
There are so many shells, each unique and beautiful in their own right. They start picking some, and I make some excuse not to, but soon enough we’re making trips back to camp with handfuls. The pile grows and grows. Soon enough I plan on at least three necklaces and one or two bracelets for my friends. We each find about one really special shell that is so pretty and unique that it’s impossible to ignore. There is one complication though, and that is that there is a little slug still occupying it inside.
The thought of hurting an animal for a stupid little necklace is so absurd, that there is no opposition when it’s thrown back into the ocean. We build a castle. We destroy it. We go swimming. We sun bathe. Rinse and repeat.
Over and over. The same cycle. It never gets boring. Each time we go out to the ocean, we bring back more and more unique shells. It’s not until the last run that I find it. I’d been looking for a centerpiece to my special necklace all day.
This shell is so perfect for the job that nothing comes close to rivalry among the others. The way that it gets thinner at the end would be a perfect place to drill a little hole. The way it would dangle and dance of the chest of any special girl would be perfect. This is my shell. It’s here that I find the stupid slug. The stupid little creature who crawled into my perfect shell.
He’s way too big to fit in it, and he is half exposed. I poke him just to be sure, and of course he wiggles around. Fuck. You had better though that back in, my little sister tells me. It’s still alive, you know. Oh, I know.
What this little fat slug doesn’t know though, I tell her, is how I have to kill him to truly make him alive. My sister winces. Huh? We have to destroy something to make its true beauty shine. Who would care about the bikini islands before they got nuked? Why would people wear fur if they didn’t know it was from something alive and happy?
Who would ever buy a Van Gogh if they didn’t know he shot himself? If I have to kill this little slug in order to make a necklace that rivals god’s work in order to gain a sense of vanity, then the slug is being sacrificed for a great cause. Like those astronauts in the first Apollo missions. Like those pioneer scuba divers that never make it back up, they sacrificed their lives for photographs of such beauty and awe that it makes you rethink your life. Maybe, I tell my family on the way home, the world is just God’s own beautiful blue shell that he gave to his special girl, and he’s taking all of eternity to destroy us so we’ll be remembered. It’s not a wasted existence.
If the ocean starts trailing us in the rear mirror, and Neptune’s face is hurling fury and death upon us, I would have no problem crawling into a ball and waiting out my termination. I’m glad that God thinks that we are that stunning. My Scottish family with no Melanin and lost in the day’s simplicity simply reply back with, “Aye.” Back at home with a beer in my hand in the middle of the night, I reach into the bucket that I’ve stored our shells in on the side of the house. I pull out the shell. My own little earth. It’s purpose is small and simple, but it’s more then most people will ever get in life.
It’s more then most ever get a glimpse of. I feel bad for drawling out its slow starvation and dehydration. I polish off the rest of my beer, and fill it up with some water from the sink inside. Dumping the water into the bucket, you can see the slug move and reach to it. It’s not sure why it’s still alive, but it doesn’t seem to care. I’m giving it a chance to enjoy a few more simple days of existence before I drill into it’s base.
I’m giving it a chance to drive three hours north to hang out with his family before a wave of spinning metal crushes it. I’m giving the shell a chance to reflect on its purpose before he is sacrificed. It is not a wasted existence. 
