Hilda was feeling too loose (either too dissolute or too unwed and so not dissolute enough in the apparent absence of romance and absence of belonging that was part of a couple's merry-making), and this manifested itself to Gabriele's sagacious discernment. "You know, you should not laugh at your own jokes," Hilda criticized her. "You can be amused by yourself — God knows you are so good at that anyhow, playing alone in your sterile ideas — but that is as far as it should go."
"What is your problem?"
"I don't have any—just yours—what you don't concern yourself with."
"Oh? Sorry. Like what? What don't I concern myself with? You?"
"No, not me. I don't need anyone. Forget it. None of it is my business."
Gabriele stuffed some snuff into her pallet and then scratched her head for a few seconds. "It's a beautiful late Monday morn, Hilda," she said in the hope that from placating words and prevarications the noxious mood would disperse and vanish into air like smoke. " I for one want to seize the day. All the mental prostitutes are being exploited, except for you and I who have some sense about such things and will probably live to be 120 years old as a consequence, God forbid! " She pulled out two cans of beer from a cooler and spit out the dark tactile saliva that had been littering her mouth in senseless mass and clutter no differently than planets in the void of space. As perspectives were always dictated by the demands of the body in those who were not in full control of their minds, Gabriele had a hunch that Hilda was experiencing menstruation and feeling resentful that their physical encounter was not followed by redundant ones. If so, she surmised, Hilda's mood was a combination of hormonal imbalances and withdrawal symptoms from dopamine not arriving in the pleasure receptors of her brain in quantities commensurate with that earlier experience.
Hilda feigned a more pleasant smile despite herself. "Engaged as we are in contemplative leisure." These were words she often heard from Gabriele and her bantering mocked them good-naturedly.
"Well said, and in English to boot." They had departed from the world of stress-ridden fools shifting their needs for pretty escape art and aerobic therapy onto them. They had departed from the imaginary world of believing oneself to have importance catering to others' wishes and had submitted themselves over to the salt inundations of the Pacific Ocean. They had submitted themselves over to the entity as much as tepid will allowed. For at present neither of them would drown themselves to be fully and foolishly part of the entity.
Seated beside her friend, Gabriele incrementally shaped a harder replica of her from the mold of the subject and the plaster of the dampened sand. In part it no longer looked like Hilda but an effigy of Akhenaten.
"So, what about me don't I take responsibility for? What is the source of this anxiety for my sake?"