Too Late

She was impervious to the grins that were surrounding the stars above the back lit black lit beach. It seemed to her that the multitudes of marbles she had been collecting in her pockets, all of them filled with little words that would've meant something to another version of her consciousness, should be abandoned. Little footfalls on the rocks that made up a jetty (something she learned to understand a couple weeks before she hit the back of the car and decided she should drive it on the wrong side of the road) brought up clouds of dust and sand and cigarette smoke. It was a whopper. She was a scorcher. They were oblivious. The waves were getting larger. At the end, she stood out in the sea, building a model of her superfluous character out of salt and brine, and she fingered the rounded, smoothed child’s toy. The marbles made singular splashes into the sea; one, two, three, thousand. She stood there until age played upon the corners of her eyes and she could watch the passage of time on her fingernails. Once, someone had told her that sadness suited her, that she was a beautiful mistake. It became her goal to forget how to smile that summer, when she let all the grains of the eternal disasters that never actually existed fall gradually into the holes of her ratty old tights and the crevices in her scarves. Out in the distance, just below the horizon, the ocean was frozen. Icy cracks were moving toward her, hardening the massive sea. Poseidon hailed down his trident and sent the glassy surface rocketing faster her way. When the sand finally froze over, she stepped down from the rocks and walked herself, in the semblance of Jesus Christ, across the many monsoons. She would walk until she hit the end of the earth, she decided. She couldn't feel the way that the sharks were following her footsteps in the soda water below her lighted path, but their shadows were visible under the still-blazing sun. Hiding under her leather, under her skin, under her scars, she was almost invisible to the bystanders collecting to witness the coming of the lord. In circular rhythmic patterns, she made the most of a bad situation. In triangular emergencies, she kissed all the little wonders she had met on the other side of the equator. In square cars, she drove until she ran out of gas and nobody knew her name. She would tattoo a lightning rod along her spine so that maybe, one day, she’ll catch something worth holding on to.