I look out across the sea at this day that’s just starting. The colors have changed; it’s gone all half-assed pastels, nursery colors—powder pink, lemon yellow, peach, lavender, forget-me-not. The sky is baby-talking, trying to trick me into getting excited about doing something that I’m too old to pretend isn’t going to be really boring. This again—another stupid day in my idiotic life. I can’t stand it—I don’t want to do this again. Not again. I’m exhausted. I wish it could be bedtime already. It’s dawn and I just want this day to end, to have been, and for me to have lived through it. Or I could tumble down, roll over the side and onto the rocks and let the waves finish me off. Surrender is all I have energy for; the prospect makes me feel so much more alive than the thought of making my way from today into tomorrow.

Day, day, go away. Come again another, um. Shit.

After a while, all the interesting stuff stops happening in the sky. There’s a dark blue line against the horizon. I’m not sure if I like it. Maybe I do. It creates a kind of cartoonish division between the sea and the sky, keeps you from taking this whole breathtaking landscape shit too seriously.

As it gets lighter, the sea is becoming a paler shade but I don’t know what you’d call it. Right now the sea is more a texture than a color. Rough: the surface of a painting of nothing. There could be anything under there. Like how poor painters will sometimes paint over an old painting instead of buying a new canvas. Maybe the bottom of the sea is terribly ugly, riddled with errors or just not God’s best work. But even I have to admit that that’s probably not right. I know there are sparkly things and the sacred geometry of reefs, rubberinesses, spikes, spines, music, etiquette. Just like here, but hidden. Just another place where people like me never go.

I count to three. On three I’ll get up. It doesn’t work, of course. That kind of thing only works when there’s someone else around. She’d clap her hands at me. She thought I was so lazy. Come on—clapclapclap—It’s time, now. Get up!