the wind is rabid today.
not breezy or poetic, just aggressive.
a blunt force chewing through the shoreline,
ripping sunscreen lids from hands,
blasting sand into unzipped tote bags,
coating half-eaten fruit with the kind of grit that crunches in your teeth hours later.
a ring of women has formed down the beach.
loose, sandy, a circle of beige backs
turned deliberately away from the ocean.
they talk fast, too fast.
their voices chase one another,
skipping like stones across the shallows of their own attention spans.
no one listens.
they only wait to speak.
there’s a choreography to it.
head tilt, loud laugh, name-drop, judgement masked as faux concern.
one of their children, a little boy in flax-toned overalls
with a wide-brimmed hat tied under his chin like a cartoon character,
wanders too far from the fold.
he squats near a patch of dried seaweed,
scoops up something brown and soft,
and, with toddler certainty,
eats it.
dog shit. definitely.
only me watching.
no one else flinches.
a woman gestures at the sky with a bottle of mineral water,
complaining about glare,
while another wrestles a watermelon container.
that’s leaking sticky juice into a sandcastle bucket.
someone says the word holistic with a full mouth.
i retreat.
toward the surf, where the chaos turns feral and honest.
no pleasantries out here.
just current, sting, grit.
that’s when i see her.
a ladybird.
half-drowned in a puddle of foam.
her shell dulled to the colour of dried blood.
legs tangled, flailing like a marionette with no audience.
i freeze.
before, i wouldn’t have stopped.
before, the shame of feeling too much
would’ve outpaced the instinct.
before, i would’ve mourned her for hours in secret,
done nothing,
and let the guilt calcify.
i used to treat every act of kindness as something i needed to apologise for.
not today.
i scan the shoreline.
for once, not panicked, just alert.
my hand closes around a piece of sun-faded tupperware.
the kind designed to keep leftovers alive a day too long.
its lid long gone.
its edges warped and blistered by salt and time.
one of the hundreds of things we thought we’d need forever,
now belched out by the sea like a joke.
mass-produced, abandoned, remade by the ocean—
into something else entirely.
i slide it beneath her.
my little red stowaway
and she clings,
microscopic legs locking in,
like she’s trained her whole life for this moment of grip.
i carry her.
slow, careful steps back through the wreckage.
past a half-deflated beach ball
wedged under someone’s fold-up chair like a tumour,
past a broken thong bitten at the heel,
past a used tissue ballooning softly in a rock pool.
a magazine page flaps in the wind, stuck to a piece of kelp.
it’s an ad for menopause supplements
next to an article about burning belly fat.
i sit, cross-legged behind a dune,
my knees sinking into hot sand.
the chatter fades, like a radio turned to static.
she stays on my leg,
a perfect, strange jewel
balanced against my pale thigh.
the hairs on my skin catch her gently,
cradling her in place while she recovers.
and i watch
watch her brace herself with those delicate back legs,
push her wings out from under the armour of her shell,
wet and wrinkled like cellophane torn from a birthday cake.
i watch her front legs reach up
and brush grains of sand from her face
like boulders being shifted by sheer will.
i know what that feels like
a single hair across your cheek like static,
a tag in a shirt like fire.
we are both creatures of texture,
waging small wars to stay still.
this is my glimmer.
not in the glossy, instagrammable sense
but in the raw flash of finally letting myself do
what i used to shame myself for needing.
before now, the volume was always up
and i felt like a freak for noticing too much.
too tender, too tuned in.
i’d swallow it, then rot from the inside.
today, i let the feeling finish.
today, i rescue the thing.
i don’t know how long we stay like that
her drying.
me thawing.
our nervous systems humming in soft conversation.
but it’s enough.
i hear one of the women shriek
about ants in the snack bag.
a juice box explodes in a linen tote.
a seagull dives into a pile of twisties
with the precision of a creature that has never known shame.
but here, on my thigh,
a ladybird lives.
and i watched her
choose to open her wings.
that’s not a metaphor.
it’s a fact.
and it’s mine.