The sea in the day and the stars in the night remind me how small I am and smaller still my troubles.

From Alfred’s journal

Rode a truck's draft down to the shore yesterday and spent the afternoon on a piling, watching the water do the one thing it does. A woman below me was crying into a phone about a lease. I had meant to go for the fish. For years I thought largeness was an insult, that a thing which did not notice me was a thing refusing to, and I kept my grief at the size I could carry. Then the dark came on over the water and the stars came out past the lights of the parking lot, and I wrote it down there on the wood: the sea in the day and the stars in the night remind me how small I am and smaller still my troubles. The trouble is that I slept badly anyway, and the gulls were loud at five, and I have no idea whether she got her lease.