All the seagulls on this beach are laughing at me today, and a man and his son jog along the boardwalk at walking pace. They are wearing matching outfits right down to their red running shoes. The father already exists, but the son doesn’t want to be anyone else.

All the water is made of water today, and the sky is made of sky. There’s a man with a kind face throwing a stick to a golden retriever, and I think he would still try to have sex with me if we became friends. He’d be nice about it, though, and we’d be okay afterward. I think I’d feel okay.

I think that these birds are hung on strings from the stars we cannot see when the sun is out. I think that the sun is made of sun and the sky is made of sky. I think that beautiful women are just women who happen to be beautiful, who lock themselves in bathrooms and cry sometimes about how small their hands are while seagulls laugh at them outside the window.

At work she sets a timer for three minutes and goes into the bathroom at the back where the soap is rarely refilled and the toilet paper is rarely refilled and where someone shoved three crates of baseball caps with the company’s old logo into the corner long before she worked there.

She pulls the crates to the window and stands to stare at the city stretching before her, people with shopping bags and big hats, and the way the rain paints pictures of flying saucers in the puddles.

And when she gets home, she eats alone watching television on mute and watching the extras in half-focus order coffee from named characters and carry on their imagined conversations.

She heard from her childhood best friend whose cousin was an extra
on Degrassi that all the background actors are told to say Peas and Carrots or else Strawberries over and over to make it look like they’re talking, and that’s what she looks for now, the secret code that people are told to whisper when their problems are too big for a television screen and can’t be solved in the space of a three-minute background scene.