Chiemsee, 21 July — in retrospect
There is no photograph from 21 July 2020 in any of my libraries. I noticed this later, sorting through the files — the previous day's photos end at 20:51 with a sunset over the lake, the morning of 22 July begins at 07:33 with fog over the same water. Between those two timestamps, ten hours of darkness and fourteen hours without a click.
I don't remember what that day was. Probably nothing. We were parked in the same spot as the day before and the day after. It was high summer, twenty-six degrees, we had cooked and read and swum. Maybe again. Maybe twice. Maybe two hours of pause that fit no plan.
By the age of fifty you turn sentimental about days that go missing in memory. That's a first, childlike reaction — I'd have done something if I'd known. But that's exactly the kind of day you cannot manufacture. It happens, or it doesn't. The day before, you expect nothing. The day after, you don't notice what didn't happen.
As a child a day without an act would have unsettled me. I can say that precisely because I knew such days as a child and filed them, to my own regret, under failure. Today I file them under a different heading: the unproductive, the kind so easily acknowledged too late that years pass before you see what they were.
Probably nothing. Probably exactly that.