Floating

One of my favorite things to do on Lake Michigan is float. I'm not much of a daredevil when it comes to motorized water activities, so floating on a raft or inner tube is just enough danger for me. I would often do this at the Conference Grounds with my housemates. We'd take our tubes down to the beach and wade out to the first sandbar. That sandbar is awesome because the water is only about waist-deep there. We'd hoist ourselves up onto our rafts, stretch out, and just relax. Feel the waves passing beneath our bodies, feel the sun on our faces, miles away from the rest of civilization, almost.

Sometimes I'd find myself carried way down shore even though I felt like I hadn't moved. The waves were just subtle enough to become unnoticed. But when I opened my eyes and looked around, I didn't recognize the shoreline. The first time this happened, I had a moment of minor panic because I figured I had floated at least a mile. A few more moments of looking around and studying the beach told me that I was only four or five properties down. All I had to do was paddle to shore and just walk back and I'd be back at the Conference Grounds.

If only it was so easy in real life as walking back.

I've had an overwhelming sense of floating this summer. And not good floating, like the moments after a first kiss. I'm talking about the feeling you get when you're laying in bed at night after a long day on the water and you feel like you're still out there. You feel like you're moving up and down with the whims of the waves and just when you feel steady again, another invisible wave nudges you off-balance again. That's the feeling I've had this summer throughout the fatigue, the tiredness, the sickness, the medication changes, and the fact that even though I graduated, I'm not done yet. All of the friends I graduated with have packed their summers with weddings, job interviews, and moving truck rentals. I'm just floating along here, buying textbooks for another semester. And even though I know that this is exactly where I'm supposed to be, it doesn't mitigate how I feel.

I don't really have a happy wrap-up lesson to end this post with, probably because this season of my life is not happily wrapped up yet. I'm just out here floating until I can get back to shore and walk to back to where I once again recognize my surroundings.