MORGAN KOVACS

I had my first kiss along the Lake Erie shore with a Russian exchange student, our teeth clinking together. I kept my eyes open because a first kiss is something one should see. It was his first time there, my thousandth. Within five months, the lake would be deemed undrinkable and half a million people would be without water. I think about that now and wonder, if as we were kissing, his fingers hooked through the belt loops of my low-rise jeans, was the algal bloom already forming, releasing toxins into our only water supply? It must have been, but at that moment, on that damp April afternoon, my hair frizzing in the humidity, we were just two kids, kissing at the lake. To us, at that envious age of 16 with hardly a prefrontal cortex, the future was nothing but a notion; like the Canadian border, we knew it was there, just across the water, but could only see it when we squinted. 
        June came, as if by surprise, and he went back to Russia, reentered a life I knew nothing about. I spent that summer suffering my first heartbreak; sleeping in my mother’s bed and laying in the sun, hoping the vitamin D would heal me. Worse, what once soothed me—–a walk, barefoot, along the lake at sunrise, alone but for the seagulls skimming the water—–became intolerable. Solitude and peace are a hard thing to come by when a place is saturated with memory. Those massive rocks edging the water. The fishy smell, the sound of lapping water, the birds, the wind whipping my hair around my face. 
        Him, everywhere. 
        Dozens of organizations exist to protect this water and shore. They do their best to make sure we never have another toxic bloom. They pester lawmakers and hold fundraisers. They finance research projects and measure water quality. They try, admirably, to save the lake, but preserving a place forever is an impossible task.