sailboat

Joe Serrato
Jul 24, 2017 · 3 min read
This is a terrible photo, but these are not.

The wind at Lake Otsego kicked into a gale at about 4:30 PM. Gray clouds of various shades covered the sky, with tiny blue-white enclaves mixed in. At certain angles, these enclaves matched with the sun, allowing for pinches of daylight to cascade onto the trees below.

A sailboat is gliding across the lake, and is now less than 200 feet from shore. I can see a few crew members make adjustments to their sail. From the boat’s movements, I can tell the winds could be an issue. To myself, I imagine how anyone on board would conclude that the right gust of wind always comes at the wrong time.

I’ve been trying to find myself, a horribly vague personal conquest. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to stand atop a soapbox and announce the finding of myself, empirically tested and confirmed. Nobody can actually do this, yet it’s an unrealistic ideal I keep in my head. Life is not a key fitting into a lock. Being human is placing 50 keys into 50 locks, and hoping three of them open a door. I’ll never find myself, my whole self and everything that I am and what gives me meaning behind any of those locked doors.

Instead, I find pieces. I find that I can paint (to an extent) which leads me to the Museum of Modern Art, permanent home of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. I stood less than a yard away from one of the most iconic paintings in human history, as though I had been placed on the planet to do exclusively this. I was where I needed to be.

I sit bleary-eyed before a game at AT&T Park, thinking about how I’ve grown personally in the last 18 months. With a bolt of energy, I write down a list of my accomplishments in this timeframe. After feeling so emotional, I am able to compose myself.

I visit my grandmother in hospice, running my hand through her hair and a leaving peck on her cheek. She cannot see, she cannot hear, and she can hardly talk. I know that I am saying goodbye.

About five minutes later, I refocus on the sailboat’s continuing struggle against the wind. Every time the boat would make progress closer to shore, a gust would push it sideways, backwards, any which way but to shore. Yet, the crew didn’t seem panicked.

As the winds gave another heave, I realized I am that sailboat struggling against the current, confident but not assured of reaching shore. I’ll likely juggle internal dilemmas and personal demons all my life. I could be confident with what I know/who I am at all of 22 years old, but I want to keep going. I want to explore, write and rewrite my personal definitions, learn as much as I can, and spread what I know to the people most important to me.

I want to reach the shore, look back at the water, and laugh at how rough the currents seemed. But this won’t be for decades.

At about 4:55 PM, the sailboat docked on shore.

    Joe Serrato
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