howtohurtyourfriends:
They are sitting at the edge of a cliff, like they do whenever they are depressed or need to talk or are depressed because they need to talk or need to talk because they are depressed. This cliff in particular is just an excuse for an excess of sand and chalk, but they are so hungry. To the boy and the girl it looks more like chalk and cheese, more like each other. The boy used to eat sand when he was younger. The cliff gets hungry too, its favourite food: footprints. Humans, a close second. It has eaten a total of three people to-date. The sea: twenty three. Humans attach memorials to the cliff like bibs. In loving memory of Jonathan stitched into sand that spans length of a baby’s diaphragm. The cliff has always been Mother Nature’s spoilt child. The boy looks at the girl and the girl looks out to sea so she does not have to see him looking at her. The girl digs her fingernails and then her finger and then her hand into the top layer of chalky sand and sandy chalk, while the boy tries to make small talk. She ignores him, crushing every word he says between her hands like the sand she’s holding. Her arms remind him of justice scales. She would never make a good lawyer the boy thinks to himself. What the girl doesn’t realise is that she’s really just adding the finishing touches to a sand castle the boy’s been building for as long as she can remember remembering him. All this time while the girl’s attempted to excavate her bric-a-brac brain, the boy’s been digging out his stomach. She’s deflective: she doesn’t want to think about anything. Especially him. He’s reflective: he just wants to find the bottom of this goddamned godforsaken pit. He’s sure it’s somewhere pretty close to hell or at least to the centre of the earth, or China. The girl pats the finishing touches of the castle and the boy feels a fist fill the inside of his stomach; the pail to a well. He thinks one of us is going to hell for this.
