D-Days of August

Even at the height of my productivity senior year, or last summer, or during Moscow, I felt dissatisfied. I chalked it up to some hybridized overachiever's complex mixed with Napoleon. Sprinkled-on inferiority for flavor.

Compare me to a summer's day; I am far lovelier and more temperate. Compare that dissatisfaction with a day at a half moon of a lake. Accumulate the minutiae, the likes and dislikes, the hopes and dreams: a life in the woods, a childhood of lakes and paddleboats, memories of Sea-Doos and Bose blasting across the waterway and sunlit oil paintings. Time contracts, levels and variations of the future quash into one narrative, one sentence refers to tomorrow, and the next to five years from now, and the following to this coming Thanksgiving, as if there were no absolute passage of time. Note the new colors even I - the self-professed connoisseur of sunsets - see in the reflections of those calming waters, the shades of blue and maroon, soft orange and pinks and greens.

A boat, its motor barely running, glides across the perimeter of those waters, a single white light above its starboard side, a lantern in the night. And there's no guilt in sitting and observing its slow passage.