Someone is flying a kite up ahead. Kids tryna bodyboard but just getting sloshed around. Couple bigger dudes in tanks shoulders torched lobster-y up on the plateau edge drinking beers in cozies. You almost step on a shell. Not a shell. A crab. A dead crab. Dead crabs everywhere suddenly. The wind whips harder the more the shoreline bends, you feel. Tank flapping like a flag. You flip your bucket cap’s front up like Baba used to on vacations growing up, before Jiji passed. The dead crabs mean everything. Jiji in Santa Cruz that once before you moved there, when just vacationing there, crouching down sitting on heels dress pants rolled up like Asian dudes out front bodegas do, grabbing the crabs in the tide pools on the reef down the cliff path by where, once you moved there, drunk and wilding, you’d first enter another. Where you’d go down to sit at night, alone and sober, once entering others was no longer a thing you were concerned with. Once you’d done it enough times to not have to do it to say you had. Jiji not even stunting grabbing the crabs like that. Just doing it curiously, looking at em from all angles, indifferent to mine and lil sis’s yadaaa exclamations to No what if it pinches. That memory tangible bc it wasn’t just a mental memory but a body-experience. What you thought of / felt subsequently whenever something squirm-y happened.

But these crabs are different. Not squirmy lil guys flailing their pincers alarmed to be lifted outta the kiddie pool. These are big crabs. Football sized. And dead. Just parched-ass shells that look more like root vegetables. Turnips. White pinkish turnips. You start taking pictures of them bc now they are everything. Ex bae a Cancer. Roomie bro a Cancer. Side bae a Cancer. Editor bae a Cancer except cusp Leo—why you keep knocking on that door. The cusp Leo will save you. The Cancers are the moms that will take care of you. Continually being taken care of what keeps getting you. You’re too receptive to being taken care of. Cancers accept you for your solo loner shit. They’re down to go in on it with you. But your solo loner shit is the thing you gotta stop going in on. Your solo loner shit got you here. You stop taking pictures after maybe three. Top, side, bottom. That’s enough—

Roomie bro and B and a couple pals approached from the plateaued region. They were tryna head back. I was tryna head back. It was time to head back.