100 Words: Peeking

Peeking up from the edge of a hammock on the lakefill, someone’s reading Between the World and Me. The graduates flock in their purple robes, some masked, most barefaced. Warm and humid. The lake shades from blue to lead as I follow the usual path on my usual stroll, trying to clear my mind of all the cobwebs and rags that piled up through a day that started with a strangely convincing dream of a barefoot woman in a white dress and long curly hair—a woman I knew was me or had been me, pre-Raphaelite vision of the self ephebed.