You stand next to me, silent. That's alright. For now.

"You can't keep doing this," I say for no real reason.

There never is a reason for anything, in my opinion. You once told me you agreed.

Again, you say nothing as you stand beside me. The sand creeps into the crevices between our toes. It's a dense slime that squelches and hardens into a thick, golden mass bearing the imprint of our feet. The waves crash into our ankles, climbing as far forwards as they can before retreating back into black nothingness, leaving mounds of off-white paste over our feet. You wiggle your toes as you think, disturbing the mounds on your skin. I let mine weigh my feet down, anchoring me to the earth as if it of all things would keep me from floating off into the deep, black space even the moon shuns for tonight.

"You can't keep doing this." I repeat, hoping to get a response from you. "You've got to care about something sooner or later. I mean, you can't be a child your entire life, right?"

"Why not? No one says I can't," you finally say.

It's true, though. No one actually says you can't be a child, but they do say that you can't do a lot of other things. They say that you can't get money for nothing, for example.

Never until then do I find it odd that we prize small, colored slips of paper or even smaller, round disks of metal over anything else nowadays. They have pictures of monuments and the faces of the dead on them, but we keep them neither for long-lost memories of visits to those monuments nor for the sentimental morbidity of losing those dead people. Yet, they're more important than God in this world. People say it's because you can't live without these bits of long-forgotten trees and mountains, but somehow, I think it would be harder to live without the trees and mountains that made them.

People kill each other over these, and I wonder if it's necessary. Perhaps the animals have an idea. If we have no monetary system, then our problems would be solved. Perhaps to get to peace, we need to be barbaric.

"What do you think of the future?" I inquire.

Another wave collides with the earth, washing over our skin and brushing up against the earth. I think if a human performed the same moves, it would be inappropriate. It's funny how nature can get away with far more than humans can.

"Why think about the future at all?" you respond.

Your voice catches me off guard. I'm pulled from my fantasies to your face, still turned down at the mounds of sand creeping onto your feet. You wiggle your toes again before you say anything more, and I wait patiently for that addition.

"The past is nothing but a mere illusion imprinted in our minds," you say. "Its effects still shape our future, yes, but the fact remains that it no longer exists. We do not continuously live in yesterday. However, the same holds true for tomorrow. It will exist sometime soon, but it doesn't right now. We should always concern ourselves with what exists now."

I ponder over the logic of this. It doesn't seem right to me, yet it still makes sense.

"I'm tired," you tell me out of the blue.

Before I can say anything, you kick off the last of the sandy lumps and walk away. I'm left with the moonless night and the lovemaking of the earth and sea.