I lift my face up to the sun, letting the warm rays wash over my pale skin. I've been sitting on this lawn chair for about forty-five minutes, and I can just now begin to see tiny sun freckles forming on the crown of my shoulders. The sounds of soft waves breaking against the dock fills my ears; I'm so close that I can feel droplets of water trickle down my toes. Birds - small ones, white and pale gray - circle around the sky, putting on a show for me. Between the soft waves, I can hear them talking - the birds - and I wonder about their secrets. Surely they have better things to talk about than the weather or who caught the biggest worm this morning. I finally get a good look at the kaleidoscope sky. It reflects off of the lake; its murkiness is transformed into a near perfect copy of swirled blues and pinks and oranges.
Off in the distance I see the faintness of fog. The longer I look, the more vast the cloud becomes. Soon enough, my brain fills with fog. The colors, the sounds, and the water on my toes become replaced with gray.
The clock on my front wall reads 6:45 AM. My mouth is cotton dry and my bones are board stiff. As my eyes adjust to the blind's light slivers, I feel it.
Homesick.
For a place I'd never been.
