sunrise (draft)

A man older than time sat in the darkness with his feet buried in sand having scoured the beach for hours looking for seashells. But the only ones that he found were broken. He was furious. Why were all the shells broken? For years he had collected stones, all of them rough and dirty, because he could find no shells. He wanted shells, unbroken. Secretly, although he would not admit it to even himself, he wanted to take these unbroken shells and gaze at their beauty, then smash them into a thousand pieces and throw them to the waves and then look out over the horizon unflinching. Nothing could touch him. Nothing. Now he was fed up with rough, dirty stones. He could find no shells, so he would get the next best thing: rocks that were smooth. He looked at the rock in his hand deviously. Rough, covered in mud, nowhere near smooth. He took it to the water, and washed it off. He sat on the beach with the stone, rubbing it with his skin, sanding it down, smoothing it out. There was no pain he told himself. His skin was as rough as sandpaper and could therefore smooth out a rock to be as smooth as if it had stood there for a thousand years. It took hours for him to do this, and when he was done, the damage to his skin was severe. But he looked out over the dark horizon unflinching. Pain was nothing to him. He did this to all the rocks, until a sizable stack of smooth stones was created. He had done it. He had created a stack of smooth stones out of rough stones. And his skin was so rough now that pain was muted by the lack of nerves. He could feel nothing in his hands. He masturbated there and it was almost like something that he had not felt for many years. But now he stopped. Something was different. The rocks, the beautiful rocks. What once was rough was now smooth, homogenous and as empty as the shells never found. And when he realized his mistake, his spirit was as broken as the shell fragments littered about the beach. Confused and angry, he threw the rocks at the sea, looked out over the horizon and flinched. Something was different. The man lay down in the sand, so angry at the world, and he buried his feet in the sand. And then he sat there and watched the sunrise. And he wept.