Every year is different - like a changing shoreline, the tides ebb and flow, and with every passing day the sands move. They say you never stand in the same river twice, but it’s these ever-shifting places that through millennia shape the land. And as they etch themselves windingly along the surface of the earth, every day carves into me. Spring meltwater and slow summers alike. I waded through the brooks and lake-shores of western Massachusetts this fall, where the rainbow trout and blacknose dace live, as the world spun hazardously around me, in and out of my head. A long summer seeded a long fall, and though the winters become warmer each year, the days are still short and blinding, and they remind me to look back (there is a species of herring that can only be distinguished from another by the color of its guts- some things you can only see after they are gone). I too am marked by this fall, by the things that hurt and the things that didn’t. Marked by mistakes- regret and guilt- but also by love. By the stars and the moon and by long walks to the convenience store. These beautiful things, however big or small, that lay beside me in the grass. We remind each other- there is a future, always. Sometimes, the river will be hard to navigate, cold and rocky. Sometimes your waders will have a hole in them. And you might not even catch any lamprey. But it will not be this way forever - you have to keep pushing, even as the waters move under you, because every direction you move in is forward. Thank you to MVYouth, and to all of those who helped me continue onward this fall - I will remember you.