Reflection 01
The previous weeks, I’d overheard them murmuring about my need for Outside Time and Vitamin D. Back then I was a lover of economics, and obsessed at that period of my life, between 60 and 88 months old, with criticizing Milton Friedman’s ideas of monetary policy.
Reflection 02
I was difficult on the drive to the coast. I screamed, kicked the back of my father’s seat, and sang over their capitalist pop music with an acoustic rendition of Paranoid Android. I did not do Thom Yorke justice, and for this I apologize.
Reflection 03
Warm sand. The sound of waves crashing and salt falling onto my skin like summer snowflakes. And yes, even Vitamin D. I did not realize that vitamin deficiency had been impacting my body until I walked into the sun. My parents noticed my cheered up mood and were relieved to sit down while I explored the coast.
Reflection 04
I was ignorant of its existence. A blind spot in my studies of the animal kingdom. I came across it collecting shells. One conical, pink and orange. I still feel the nausea. A pale, meaty thing crawling out. Naturally I threw it. I squatted and it popped its head out. Are there others like you? I asked. And quickly I picked up the other shells nearby. A new world discovered.
Reflection 05
I couldn’t sleep knowing they existed. Crustaceans hidden in plain sight, existing beside ignorant, sandy feet. What else was there for me to uncover? I pestered my parents day after day. The beach I cried, the beach! I screamed about Vitamin D deficiency. The Beach became a Sunday ritual.
Reflection 06
I began to bring them home with me.
Reflection 07
A terrarium. Deep in my closet, hidden by clothes that no longer fit. I feed them strawberries and they go crazy. My Mother, a bit of a nutrition nut, has been overjoyed by my interest in fruit. She has tried to get me into pomegranates, dragon fruit, and blueberries. She goes on and on about the health benefits. All of it, no doubt repeated from some Dr. Oz type figure in her Facebook feed. Over and over again I tell her I only like strawberries. Of course, I detest the fruit, but it makes the hermit crabs frisky.
Reflection 08
They’ve outgrown the terrarium and roam throughout my room. At night I feel them crawl across my face, my stomach and legs. The ones without shells cause me to cover my mouth so I don’t wake my parents up with my screams. Hairless, fleshy creatures all around me. They are out numbering me. Soon they will break out of my room, covering my parents home.
Reflection 09
Father watches the Kentucky Derby, complaining to Mother how much people will spend on horse breeding.
Reflection 10
We race them in the sandpit. Before school, recess, lunch, and even after class, where their parents have to drag them away screaming. Mother and Father have mentioned a couple times that my backpack is heavy (yes, I am carrying that many) but I tell them that I’m reading Gravity’s Rainbow.
Reflection 11
What I lose in crab weight I gain in lunch money.
Reflection 12
They tell me I seem happier. Mother cites the Vitamin D, Father cites There’s a World Out There Son. I think it’s the amount of money I’m making. There is a world I’ve been shielded from because of a lack of capital, and I’m finally able to participate. No more dino-nuggets and broccoli without consent, bright futures college fund, and authoritarian administration of television stations. I order porterhouse, day trade and have every subscription, even the naughty ones.
Reflection 13
Skills I thought would be permanently intuitive faded with a lack of attention. My motive in the beginning was not for profit but to export what I had too much of, and I lost sight of basic economic principles. Even the first graders know a flood of supply creates a drop in demand.
Reflection 14
I made some bad trades too, but rock bottom isn’t so bad when you’re seven. There’s a lot of distractions and I can lose myself in art without people telling me there’s no money in it.
Reflection 15
We have this skewed sense of time where every moment lasts an eternity yet we don’t dwell on anything. You’d think it’d be the opposite. That the adults would forget, time moving too rapidly to hold on to the past. Yet they carry their problems forward, moment after moment.
Reflection 16
Sand castles are an infantile art form, but it’s been soothing for me. I’m into Gaudí lately, and you can see him in my work. That and the Architectural Digests I take from Father’s office. My parents seem to be more at ease with this activity, although I can tell there’s discomfort within the intricacies of my designs. I don’t bother with the crabs anymore. There’s still too many, and I have nowhere to sell them and I can’t bring myself to discard them in the suburbs. I could bring them back to the beach, but it would take hundreds of trips and I worry that my parents would see me. I’ve gotten back into economic theory, and being grounded would be detrimental to my work at the moment.
Reflection 17
At dinner they said they’ve been proud of me lately. I assume it’s because I’m acting how they want children to act. Obedient and stupid. Father even offered to read me a bedtime story, but I told him I’m still getting through Krasznahorkai. Of course I’ve already read and reread Krasznahorkai. I couldn’t have him puncture my room, my terrarium. I knew they’d kept their word to not venture in. They wouldn’t be able to keep the horror out of their eyes.
Reflection 18
The only image that compares is a swarm of flies on an animal carcass. A concentration of individual particles that create a solid mass, pulsating like a toad’s neck. The flies are the crabs, the carcass is my entire room. I am out of strawberries. Not even the cartons of Costco can satiate them anymore. I have not known them to be cannibals, but I’m afraid all animals become so when things get dire.
Reflection 19
The first step I took into the room was a massacre.
Reflection 20
I regret going so far in. I should’ve yelled for my parents and accepted their scorn with an open heart. There are things worse than being grounded I’ve come to realize, and now I can’t help but regret all the moments where I wasn’t a child. I’d searched for life in anything I mistook for sophistication and failed to realize how limiting words and ideas are.
Reflection 21
They begin to crawl underneath my knees and I laugh, because I’m ticklish there.
