When I arrived, I wondered if I was too early. 

After a long day of laying about the house and pretending to do laundry, I’d finally made up my mind to drive out to Lake Michigan. I didn’t really feel like driving that far, but given the changing weather and my own commitments for the fall, I knew it might be the last opportunity for me to go to the beach while it still felt like summer.

And when I’d left my house, I worried that I was going too late in the day. Now, however, as I stood in the parking lot, debating whether to take my sweatshirt and my book, I thought the opposite might be true. I almost took the book, in case I needed something to fill the time until the sun began to sink, and only left it due to my dislike of carrying extra things. 

The forest was still full of light—plain daylight—filtering through the green leaves when I started walking toward the beach. A few deer (so plump compared to the urban deer of Grand Rapids) grazed in a meadow along the trail. As I neared the beach, the trees turned into small, scrubby bushes, and the dirt trail into sand. I took off my shoes, letting the warm, soft sand cover my feet. 

Eventually, I emerged at the crest of a dune overlooking the lake. Above, the sun still shone hot and white. I thought of the book in my car and wondered if I should go back for it. 

First, however, I raced down to the water. When the water first slapped my toes, it was cold—the chill of autumn, I thought. A moment later, I’d changed my mind; the lake always feels cold at first, even in summer. The waves, tall and white-tipped, drew me further in until they’d hit not only my shorts but also my t-shirt. As I ran back to shore so I didn’t go too far out, I regretted not bringing a bathing suit, and I wondered if I’d regret getting so wet later on in the evening. Nevertheless, I let the waves draw me out a second, a third, a fourth time. 

During the last day of a season, you cannot think of later. There is only an uncomfortable, almost compulsive need to enjoy the moment. 

After the fourth time of getting called into the lake by the waves, I spotted a lighthouse in the distance. Suddenly, I was torn: which was more important to enjoy—the still-temperate waves crashing against my body, or their fingertips reaching for my toes as I investigated the distance to the lighthouse? 

The lighthouse won. 

However, after about twenty minutes, I realized two things. First, I was not noticeably closer to the distant lighthouse than before. Second, the sun was now beginning to sink. 

In the interest of not being too far from the main trailhead when dusk hit, I walked back to the main part of the beach, where various couples had congregated. Sunsets are apparently very romantic things, in the Hallmark-propagated, commercially viable sense of the word; I half-expected to be asked to take someone’s engagement photos. 

Beneath the now-orange sky, the lake had turned from blue to teal. The trees on the crest of the dune above me, which had seemed so staunchly summer-like all day, now glowed golden in anticipation. In the cooling air, the couples drew closer together on their blankets. Perhaps this is what makes watching the sunset such a staple date night: still dressed in their light, daytime clothes, people are forced together by the cold of evening. I don’t know. I don’t have any relevant experience. 

For me, however, the sunset was romantic in a very different sense of the word. 

As the sun sank lower and lower, I felt myself get tense, not with anticipation but with anxiety over whether I was enjoying the sunset enough. Every especially lovely thing, every particularly happy moment makes me a little anxious or sad even as they happen, because I know they will end. “Beauty that must die; / And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu,” John Keats put it. And with sunsets, the moment we most appreciate is when they are most nearly over: when the red sun hovers just above the deep green horizon. 

After watching the sun for over two hours, that moment felt very short. I saw the sun touch the water, I glanced over my shoulder at the trail to the parking lot, and by the time I looked back, the sun was practically gone. Above the dark lake, the sky was turning from orange to grey-blue.

Like most of the other people on the beach that night, I lingered for several moments. I felt almost guilty for not enjoying the sunset properly while it lasted. It was stupid, I knew, to be this conflicted because half the reason I hadn’t enjoyed it properly was that I was already thinking of it being over. At least I had my consumption-ridden, Romantic-poet friend Keats to reassure me this wasn’t some novel way of being bad at enjoying things: “In the very temple of Delight / Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine.”

When I finally turned away, the sand still warm beneath my feet, I wondered if I was turning away too soon. The sky behind me was still orange around the edges. 

However, on the walk back to my car, shivering in my damp shorts and t-shirt, I wished I’d left just a few minutes earlier.

Grace Buller

After graduating from Calvin in May 2025 with a degree in writing and Spanish, G. E. Buller decided to stay in Grand Rapids. Currently, she is working as a special education aide. Her non-writing hobbies include fussing over her aquarium and reading about medieval/early modern nuns.