"Everything will go your way now."

That was the message from my fortune cookie when they served hot dinner on the Aeroflot flight. It's great that they come up with these encouraging things. You realize they can't possibly influence your luck, but at the same time, you naively hope that this message is meant specifically for you. Who knows, maybe a piece of dough really can become a companion to my luck?

Of course, it's unlikely, but if you believe it, it will be so. And you also have to put in a lot of effort. Because luck cannot exist without movement.

I run. From everything that has strings attached to the real world. It's temporary, useless, but it allows me to live another life. Because it's boring to be locked in one reality all the time. We are the same, but life is different. And how it accepts us is the most interesting thing. Beginners have luck. Let it be so!

There are two absolute reasons why I wouldn't want to leave here: the ocean and the balcony with a glass table and a view of the bay.

In the morning, you can observe the peace that has crept into every rare tree on our island, into every protruding rib of water from the wavy wind...

The deep calm is disturbed only by the eternally alive bridge connecting the island to the mainland. At night, it is full of movement and light. Polished beetles with burning eyes rush to work, on vacation, towards a new life, towards good and bad news... Movement, movement... Light is needed for movement.

There is always light in our living room. In the mornings, it floods it up to the hallway, and in the evenings, it barely reaches the kitchen. It slowly slides off the knives and spoons in the cutlery holder, flashing with blades, playing with sparkles on the fins of a poor fish in the aquarium, for which this is the most incredible event of the day, approaches tanned hands and salty hair at the table, throws itself onto the pillows of the black leather sofa, the scratches of which, like deep wrinkles, are shyly covered by a coffee-colored blanket, and then the sun reaches the balcony, passing every ray through the ribbed blinds... These uneven black gaps on the floor resemble a torn harp. Its strings are made of shadows, and the body is woven from sunlight. As soon as the wind touches the pliable slats, the whole structure sways, and it seems that someone is plucking the strings of a damaged instrument...

I run. Then a push - a second wind, the body has awakened, energy poured into the body like a cold stream and forced me to speed up. Running along a narrow strip of sidewalk near the road is not very pleasant, the asphalt is soaked with sun, and traffic lights are found on almost every street, you have to stop either because of human conventions or because of the impossibility of nature's whims. I turn towards the residential sector in the hope that I can run calmly to the bay there.

A clan of cyclists whistled past me, crushing the grass with ribbed tires. Because I am running towards them, the noise doubles, as if a whole field of singing cicadas is chirping. A tart, naked sound.

Suddenly, the ringing of Chinese bells on someone's door crept into this summer. The complete opposite of the crackle of bicycle tires. It penetrated the first sound, mixed with it, as if crystal vials were swaying over a flaring fire. If I ever hear this duet again, the low panel city of Ocean City with bicycles chained to fences will immediately appear before my eyes.

And then I notice these creatures. They remind me so much of my childhood, when my school friend and I saw huge scorpions in the bushes near our house. I still partly believe that it was so. I still dream about them sometimes. But seeing these giant crabs, I first thought they were dead stingrays. As if the path to the ocean was blocked by boulders, and they died.

Their shape is exactly like a stingray: a blunt nape and a wedge-shaped tail. And even the name is appropriate - horseshoe crab. Anyone can say that you need to love all of nature, but at the sight of them, my teeth ached from some incomprehensible disgust for these monsters. It is so difficult to fight the dislike of ugliness. They wiped their huge claws against each other, and the skin ossifications grated from the tightness. The whole bay belonged to the horseshoe crabs. I looked at them and thought that they are on their own, they can't do anything to me, they don't even care that I'm standing here, not one stopped digging into the sand or wiping its claws against each other, and I don't like them. It is difficult to fight the dislike of ugliness. I leave their lair enchanted, disturbed, ashamed.

During reproduction, when horseshoe crabs group on deserted shores, people collect them. They say they have very valuable blood. I imagined a picture of how they, ugly and useless to anyone, are thrown at each other with stones and taken to a blood collection farm. Blue blood the color of the ocean. A large gathering of horseshoe crabs is very reminiscent of an army equipped from head to toe. Reliable helmets the color of the ground have been guarding their insides for four hundred and fifty million years, and the tail is belligerently thrust forward, inviting to join the battle. But in reality, they are not only not dangerous, but also useful to humanity. Probably, after experiments, they are simply disposed of. Such is the fate of these creatures, in whose veins the ocean flows...

I run. Another five kilometers, I see only purple sneakers and tanned knees. Without a head, I immediately go to the beach. And then - pain, radiating to the jaw with every step and a terrible fear of going to doctors. I lay all night with strange symptoms resembling sinusitis and thought about the fact that I need to change my ticket and fly back to Russia. I had to pay for nine kilometers of unprepared running with these five days of fear.

I think the ocean cured me. Or rather, I know it cured me.

The ocean walked through my body. It opened me up, penetrated through every cell directly into the skeleton, lingered there and stirred my insides. But without its inherent severity, rather softly, with a teaspoon...

I was a vessel that it was so eager to fill to the brim, pouring water into my ears, nose, and throat. It drew me inside, made a warlike rumble and pushed. That's how uninvited guests are shown the door. A snow-white mane struck from behind like a whip, it doesn't matter if you managed to inhale or not, it's like a slap in the face, impudent, wet, caustic. Blue blood. The blue blood of horseshoe crabs. If it spills into the ocean, no one will even notice. Only the waves will hum even more...

No one wants to disturb the age-old majesty of the ocean when fog approaches the island. It immediately seems defective, forgotten. And because of this, the gray waves climb higher and higher out of the water, they are more and more interested in who will dare not only to wet their feet and look at the dark bubbles in the sand, but also to go into the water up to the heart and lower their hands into the cold for a long time, exposing the skeleton under the chest from sudden vigor.

Old, old ocean... No matter how much happens in the world, it doesn't care. A person always needs something from it, either he takes the lives of sea creatures, or launches his boats, or throws tons of chemicals into the environment in which he himself will never have to live - after all, he walks on land, he has no gills or fins. And the old man-ocean always just sighs patiently.... The wind sways its foam of white hair, sometimes combing it smoothly back, sometimes curling it into curls of different sizes, which break into beads on the shore, and a couple of three beads reach the crossed fingers of hands on the shore, on which some panama hat is dozing. The panama hat rises, listens to the mood of the sea and falls again on the knuckles of the fingers. But when a transparent veil lies on the island, there are no crossed hands on the sand. Occasionally, gold prospectors are visible. They stand with their backs to the ocean, their gazes dig sandy caves and find untold treasures there, long-forgotten hoards or someone's chains and earrings that accidentally slipped off a wet body...

On the shore, clumps of dark brown seaweed are scattered. Time tore them out by the root and made them gray waves. The ocean has seen everything, it knows everything, it is the oldest of all old men. Of course, over all the millennia that it has been alive, it has lost both sight and hearing, but it has never lost its exciting, titanic power, its audacity that does not require refusal, and its irreconcilable rebellion.

They say it calms you down. That's all because wherever you look, it has no limits. It is always peaceful to look at something that has neither beginning nor end. At any point, everything is the same, similar. Wherever you poke, there is water, water, water...

To listen to the inexhaustibility of the ocean. To peer into its constancy, to look for flaws. To run. To touch the velvet of the sand with your hair. To inhale salt and iodine. To stroke the wave on its gray hair when you are afraid to go into the water above your heart.

"Everything will go your way now."