The artist wakes up to her alarm ringing, ringing. She stares at it through sleepy eyes and it stares back at her, with fluorescent eyes, telling her that it's time.
The artist gets up, washes, eats, brushes her teeth, gets dressed and shuts the front door behind her as she makes her way out for the day. Maybe this day will be different. Maybe this day she'll make an impact on the world. A big enough impact to cut down through the sand.
She hurriedly makes her way down to the interface, where land meets ocean. She steps from cold rock onto soft sands. She looks around to see that a few other artists have already started their work for the day.
She starts creating her piece. She works the sand with her hands, cutting lines into the beach. The lines get deeper and deeper, and a picture starts to unfold in front of the prying eyes of the gulls that spy overhead. Around her, the gulls see a huge mass of others trying to do the same. Some are using tools that they've created to etch the picture. They're all desperately trying to cut further with their skills, to reach the hard rock below the sand so that they could just scratch the surface of the rock. Make an imprint in the world, before the day is done.
The gulls watch those that use long poles to try to make their mark. The poles look like an extension of the artists' own bodies, yet in reality, they're only a product to try to help the owner make some kind of mark.
As hours draw by and the sun makes its decent back into the ocean, the artists have finished their works on the sand. Over the course of the day, the gulls took special interest to those that had carved their pictures deeper into the sand.
Our artist has finished her last piece. She sits, tired and empty, as she studies her work. The gulls fly overhead but don't seem to care about what she's presenting them with. She knows she didn't craft a piece with enough quality to cut into the rock below.
Then, quietly, the sea rises. Slowly, slowly, it starts to wash away what the artist has created, until it can hardly be remembered any more. It was washed away, in time, to fade into all the other pieces that came before it on that beach.
She gets up and starts to walk home, her head quietly hung low. Maybe tomorrow she'll create something with enough quality to etch the rocks below.