-The Beatles
The lake is getting tired of our boat, as it skims the surface of the blackening water, creating creviced waves and steel-bleached foam from the prior stillness.
We’ve been out on the river for hours now and my friends keep asking me whether I want to try wake-boarding, or surfing, or whatever unnatural plastic-board-aided activity they have planned next. They don’t seem to understand that I am perfectly content just sitting on this wet leather seat, watching the red sun fall over the distant shoreline, with them.
This is one of the last times we will all be together, in one place. Already some are announcing their good-byes to Alaska or Pennsylvania or California with a handshake and a hug. Laughter and music push away the sadness for a moment but, coming back to my (finally cool) room after the long fourteen hours, I collapse and the teared significance rushes back to me.
On the two peeling-paint doors in my room, I have carefully been taping hundreds of Walgreens-developed photos of the past four years, smiling faces and red-eyed grins watching me, watching over me, as I go to sleep each night. They are bending glossy snapshots of the most important years of my life. And they are all I have left.
It's almost as if I am back on the lake, the wake of the foamy water drifts behind our boat, returning to its normal sunset stillness seconds after we leave it.
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