Thought for the Day

She grew drunk off the mid-day sun, the sound of the river lapping against the shore and the breeze brushing whisps of hair against her olive complexion. Thousands of people, young and old alike, lined the grassy bank encroaching upon the shore. Even amongst as tranquil of a scene, she dreaded the inevitable. The "Unknown" inevitable. Of what would become of her, post-grad school. She enrolled for another four years, not to become well-versed in the field of "Cultural Anthropology of the Aboriginal Samoans," but because she was petrified that one day she may be asked, and consequently expected to respond, the inevitable question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

She forced the question and the subsiding nausea into the deep recesses of her mind. Right now she was determined to put all of her strength, energy and power into "enjoying the moment." It frightened her that she could recall exactly how long it had been since she took a second to admire the clouds and their melodic metamorphisis from a skeleton to a bear on a ball to a television. The last time she felt this alive was the afternoon of her first kiss to her first boyfriend, some nine years prior. With that, she vowed to once a week, pause for long enough to look up. But even that, she knew, wasn´t how she wanted to live.