A year ago I could have sat watching the waves for hours. Lake Michigan was gorgeous, always shining as the light caught it different ways, always fresh and wild and free. I could remember spending hours marveling at the lake’s forever changing colors and moods. Now I found myself listlessly turning my gaze from the water to the trees to the specks of sand along my legs, hoping that the wind would calm down and the sun wouldn’t burn my pale skin.

“I should have brought a hat,” I said.

My cousin merely shrugged. She was properly shaded by a wide-brimmed sunhat, busy running her fingers through the sand and letting it sift down between them in elegant streams. I scratched a mosquito bite on my leg and felt oddly out of place, even though this was the very place I belonged more than anywhere else in the world. I’d been coming here every year since I was so small I could hardly toddle along the beach without falling over.

“How’s college?” Grace said at last, tilting her hat up slightly so she could look me in the eyes.

Ah, there was the inevitable question. I sighed inwardly and glanced back at the cabin, hoping somebody would come out to the beach and alleviate the need for the conversation. But the familiar faded green door stayed shut.

“It’s alright,” I said. “A little stressful, I guess.”

I bit my lip, trying to repress a hundred memories as they flooded back into my mind’s eye. They didn’t belong here, not here in the glow of summer sunlight, with the pleasant scent of sunscreen and wind mingling before me. But they came anyway. Long nights squinting at the fine print of textbook after textbook. Crowded parties in tiny rooms smelling strongly of cheap alcohol. Fake smiles from girls in fancy boots. Lonely walks from box-shaped building to box-shaped building. I pushed the memories from my mind, but they refused to go far, settling instead somewhere around my stomach in the form of a clenched, stressful feeling. It was a feeling I’d been avoiding all summer.

Grace had returned her eyes to her book, blissfully unaware of all I was experiencing. I felt an irrational wave of resentment for her peacefulness.

“How was junior year?” I asked her.

She was entirely unaware, I thought enviously. She was, as a matter of fact, just I had been last summer, and the summer before. Grace and I had always been very similar, from our laughs to our muddy brown eyes to the way we liked our ice cream. Our families rented a cottage together every year, and every year before, without fail, Grace and I eagerly reunited and discussed at length our years, lives, hopes and dreams. This time, however, there was something between us.

“It was fine,” she said in a somewhat vague tone. She closed her book. “Pretty boring.”

Boring. Well, at least she still lived with her family, and still had her stagnant group of friends and her familiar high school hallways. A small scoff escaped me, but I wasn’t sure if Grace heard. We sat for several moments in tense silence, like statues of former friends. At last she broke the spell.

“What’s wrong?” she asked in a serious tone I’d rarely heard her use.

The words hung suspended, forming a wall between us. I didn’t want to let her in. I wanted to lay on the warm, familiar sand and forget about my troubles. I wanted to turn back the hourglass and forget anything had changed. Even just for right now, just for today. I could tell Grace that things were fine, and if I really tried, I could make myself act like they were.

But even as I wished it, I knew it wouldn’t help. In one short month, I had to face it all again, the strange city and classes and new acquaintances that I somehow must manage to turn into friends. I mustered my strength and opened my mouth.

“College isn’t so great,” I said. “People are mean. I’m lonely. I want to be home.”

The words were so boring, so anticlimactic, I thought ruefully. I wished I had some grand story of heartbreak or intrigue or sorrow to tell my cousin, to put a shocked expression in her bright brown eyes which were watching me so closely. Instead, the truth was plain, unappealing, and ugly. In plain daylight, in front of the lake, all of the worries crowded in my mind seemed as if they ought to have been insignificant. But somehow, when they were all clumped together, they weren’t insignificant. They had the power to change me, and I didn’t like it. It made me feel weak.

“I’m sorry,” said Grace. “That sounds awful.”

“It’s stupid,” I said bitterly, looking away. “I’m sorry I let it change anything. I just--it’s just stupid.”

“I don’t think so,” said Grace.

Hearing the honesty in her voice, I looked up and saw sincerity in her eyes.

“That’s what everyone worries about when they leave home, isn’t it?” she said. “And to have it actually happen...well...it sounds awful.”

“I’m sure it won’t happen to you,” I said quickly, but I realized as I said it that this was hardly helpful. I had no advice to offer. I had always been a good example before, and all at once I wasn’t.

Grace smiled a shaky smile nonetheless.

“Thanks,” she said.

She paused and in the silence that followed, I no longer felt a wall between us. I returned her smile.

“When you go back, it’ll be better,” she promised me. “Things can only improve.”

I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to stay here, right where I was, even when golden summer changed to autumn and the leaves fell off the trees and the waters grew icy cold. I would be isolated from the world, all alone.

The cabin’s solitude was what had always drawn me to it, what made me love even the day-long car rides to reach it. Yet after a long year full of lonely hours, I was coming to realized that no matter how much isolation or solitude I found, I could never escape from myself, and that was what I was truly beginning to want.

“Things can only improve,” I repeated to myself. The words sounded rather stupid, but they carried hope. “Thanks, Grace.”

She nodded, and I stretched out on the sand, dreaming of future days.