Beach Bug
The beach was crowded long before the man arrived early that Saturday. There was trash littered across the concrete on the street leading up to the beach, tarnishing his usually uncorrupted place of solace. No matter what, the water would sweep up the sand and wash the ocean's trinkets onto the land before, and nothing about that would change. The land, on the other hand, was different. It was dynamic. People added pollution to the land: the concrete that burned his feet below him, the cars that poured smoke into his lungs. He didn't like the dynamic, for it irritated him too much.
The man was accompanied by his friends. He had spent the most time with them in recent months, so he learned to appoint them to that title. Daniel loved to surf, and he had taught the man how to surf many years ago. The man was growing out of it, though; he couldn't bear the shock of initially entering the water, so he decided to stop doing it. Arthur simply liked the feeling of the beach. He never surfed, as he wasn't fit to brave the waves, but he came out with Daniel each time anyway, in fear that Daniel might try a wave too great for his abilities. The three of them walked through the sand. There were people all around them as they dragged themelves over the beach's skin. A light chatter was a constant throughout the otherwise idyllic atmosphere, with the water thrashing against the rocks a mile ahead of them and gently washing on the sand to their side. The odor was a bit pungent. Seaweed and shark eggs were scattered across the sand, as the high tide had brought more gifts from the water earlier that morning. The man could feel the sand going between each toe, cutting into his skin little by little. It was uncomfortably hot. The man couldn't think about anything besides this heat, which seemed etched in the forefront of his thoughts.
They eventually found a rock to sit behind. Daniel and Arthur quickly bundled their items in a towel, placing it on the ground, and told the man, "Hey, we'll be by the water. You should join us. You said you would yesterday." The man remembered he had said that, but he denied it anyway. "I'll just sit by the rock"; he shrugged off their gesture. Arthur and Daniel looked at the man, a little bit confused, but didn't bother to react, for it had always been like this. As the two walked away, the sun gleamed off their backs, somehow directly into the man's gaze. The man finally put his head back against the rock and closed his eyes.
After sustaining himself on the beach for some time, he couldn't take it. The flock of women preparing their towels to tan were irritating him, and the sand by the rock he was sitting on was coarser than the softer sand by the tide. However, he felt that he'd committed to where he was, so he didn't move. Instead, he reached into his back pocket - which held a rectangular box marked with black text, predominantly white with stripes of red. He opened the top of the box and took out a long white cigarette with a brown butt. The cigarette was from Daniel's car, as was the lighter right behind it in his pocket. He took the lighter and lit the cigarette and put it in his mouth. He inhaled deeply, waited, then exhaled again. He felt the heat of the cigarette burning near his fingers. His lungs itched as he exhaled air. It was almost as though the cigarette hadn't changed anything, yet he felt like he was pushing away his annoyance with each cloud of gray smoke that went into the air. He noticed a round woman looking at him from a distance, with her two children pointing at the cloud of smoke. The man hadn't realized how many children were on this beach, how many people of all sorts of ages and demographics, all cohesively enjoying themselves. Even though she kept looking at him, he played no part in her life, so he continued to smoke.
The man finished his cigarette and looked at Daniel, who was walking back towards the rock. Daniel noticed a butt on the ground and asked where he found the cigarette, smiling, hoping that the man had more. The man said that he found it and had borrowed a lighter from the round woman over there. He suggested that he ask the woman, but Daniel decided not to, not wanting to leave Arthur, who was now trying out the water with a surfboard that he borrowed. Daniel smiled at the man again and asked him one more time to join. They'd gone on this trip so the man would try, but the man had insisted that he felt lightheaded from the cigarette and wanted to sit down. Daniel reluctantly turned around again, looking to the sun beaming down and dragged his feet back to the water. The man closed his eyes again, except this time the pungent odor from before was starting to pick up. A large wave crashed on the shore, inching further up the sand than those prior. It left behind a thick, slick ribbon of kelp that had festered in the dark sea for days. It was a dark, bruised shade of purple, coated in a white crust of salt that didn't hide the its rotting smell. It came to rest exactly at the base of his rock, pooling in the small divot where the sand met the stone. The man didn't move. He watched a small group of children approach. They weren't bothered by the mass of decay. They crouched down, their hands mapping the mess, pointing out bits of shell and translucent shark eggs trapped in the folds. The man coughed a few times, as to warn the children to step away from his solutide, but to no avail. One girl picked up a piece and ran away to show her mother. The man felt a sudden spike of irritation. It was the same noise, the same chatter, the same intrusion he’d been developing since he arrived. The hot sand, the seaweed, the disturbed ambience of the beach - he watched them interact with the very thing he found repulsing.
Despite this, he didn't pull his feet back. He didn't cover his nose. He just watched the smoke from his second, newly lit cigarette curl up toward the haze above, becoming one more gray plume in a sky crowded with them. He was a fixed point. The world around him was churning with life and noise, a world he wasn't a part of. He simply sat there, watching a cluster of flies replace the children and swarm the seaweed, waiting for the sun to heat the sand enough that Daniel and Arthur could finally justify him leaving without having done a single thing.
Daniel and Arthur eventually trudged back, their skin still glistening from the sun and the water. They were laughing, the kind of breathless exhales that only come from actually being in the surf. Arthur was wiping sand from his neck, and Daniel was still shaking out his hair. "You missed out," Daniel said, his voice jovial. He didn't wait for an answer, just dropped his damp towel onto the sand near the man’s foot, the wet fabric immediately darkening the dry grains. "The break is perfect right now." Arthur leaned near the rock, nudging the man's arm. It was a casual, friendly gesture, a touch that assumed kinship. The man didn't mirror it. He didn't lean back, didn't shift, didn't offer the space they were clearly inviting him to share. He just sat there, his lips tightly pursed around the cigarette almost as a justification not to respond. "You guys going back in?" the man asked, his voice flat, making the effort to move the cigarette from his mouth apparent. "Yeah," Arthur said, still panting slightly. "You sure you don't want to just walk along the shore at least?" The man looked at the seaweed, now swarming with flies, and then back at the stretch of sand they’d cleared out of. He saw the damp indentation where they had been, the towels left in a pile, the inevitable mess of the day spent. He didn't offer to pick up the towel Arthur had dropped. He didn't even look his way. He just shifted his weight, grinding his heel into the sand, and took a final puff.
He didn't hate them. He didn't hate the beach. He just hated that they were all so busy being part of this churning, messy, dynamic process, and that they expected him to join. As they turned back toward the water, he stayed anchored to his rock, letting the flies claim the space around him. He watched them fade into the distance, a pair of shifting dots in a landscape of people who were all, apparently, having a perfectly good time. He crushed the remains of the cigarette into the sand with his toe, and waited for the sun to turn that particular shade of orange that meant he could go home and finally stop watching.
"What a horrid day", he thought.
The Swarm
He felt a deep, hollow ache in his chest that had nothing to do with the heat or the smoke. It was a weight, a quiet, insistent pressure that told him he was doing this to himself, that he was building his own cage out of sand and refusal. He knew that if he stood up, if he walked into the water, if he even helped Daniel fold that damp towel, the constriction would loosen. It was such a small thing, to just move. But he couldn't. It felt like a betrayal. To stop suffering would be to admit that he had been wrong to hold onto the rot in the first place, that all the time he’d spent nursing his own isolation was a choice rather than a condition. So he leaned into the friction instead. He sat there and let the sand cut into his skin and the heat blister his shoulders, fostering the discomfort because it was the only thing he really knew how to hold. He was terrified of the lightness that would come with change, so he gripped his own unhappiness like a lifeline, watching the world move on without him, paralyzed by the realization that he was the only one holding the door shut.
The man is flawed because he holds onto the pains in his life. This comes through the form of his environment and his detrimental choices. Each moment he spends on the beach, he searches for displeasure, like the sand and the beating sun. His mindset starts and ends in the same place in this story: wallowing within his pain, using it as a scapegoat for his low effort in finding fulfullment where he is. The beach functions as an externalization of his psychology. He isn't just suffering, he is curating it. The sun and heat aren't solely discomfort, they are the active pressures he refuses to escape. His choice to stay is an aggressive act of maintenance. He isn't a victim of his pain, he is the architect. The concept of being the "scapegoat" is his most prized possession, a shield against the effort required to change.
His search for "displeasure" is actually a search for consistency. He hates change so much that he’d rather endure a degrading environment than risk a new one. This is why he is orthogonal to the ocean, and the tide. The ocean - granted - is constant too, but it moves, it recycles, it forces things to break down. The man however festers in one spot, weaponizing his stasis against everyone who tries to help him. It's not "I'm too tired to move," it's "I'm refusing to move because moving would require admitting the pain is mine to fix."
Metamorphosis
I used to be like the man. I struggled to admit I was sometimes the cause of my own problems, and searched for negatives and justifications rather than opportunities to rebound and grow. I had to suffer to learn that I was the reason I didn't prosper in many facets of my life.
What I learned from being the Beach Bug in my own domain is to frame change as an active destruction of the self-curated narrative. Growth isn't a transition, it's the conscious act of discarding the identity built around your limitations. The man is generalized as a nameless person to depict the fact that we all fall back into our justifications for limiting ourselves and suffering. We all act like the beach bug, swarming towards the rot in our lives as an excuse for our own faults. The man believes his pain is unique and central to who he is, so "getting better" feels like losing his defining feature. To embrace change is to stop viewing one's history as a fixed blueprint and instead treat it as a sunk cost. It's the shift from being a spectator of one's own erosion to being an active editor of one's environment. Make the version of yourself that needed the struggle obsolete.
Be better for yourself.