Why I Wrote This
The day began beautifully.
The stream was clear enough to count the stones beneath it. Sunlight reached all the way to the bottom, turning the gravel amber and silver. Dragonflies skimmed the surface. Somewhere upstream a bird kept repeating the same bright sentence into the trees.
The crossing looked easy.
The water was cool around my boots, the current just strong enough to remind me that rivers are always moving, even when they appear almost still. Every few steps a stone shifted slightly beneath my weight, and I adjusted without thinking.
As I worked farther from the bank, the water rose almost without my noticing. It was at my knees before I remembered it had been around my ankles. The current leaned a little harder into my legs. Once or twice I stumbled just enough to laugh at myself before finding my footing again.
The stones became smoother. The spaces between them grew wider. I noticed my hand reaching for balance before I had decided to lift it. It looked strangely distant, pale against the moving water, as though I were watching someone else’s arm solve a problem my mind had not yet recognized.
I kept going. The river was beautiful.
Then I tumble.
Rocks slam into my ribs. My shoulder cracks against stone. My hip scrapes along the bottom. Bruises bloom fast under the skin, dark and hot, spreading like ink in cold water. The world turns over and over — sky, water, gravel, sky again. I can’t tell which way is up. Cold fills my mouth. My lungs burn. Every time I try to right myself, another rock finds me, bruising deeper, knocking the air out again.
I am being carried downstream. Far downstream.
My hand is thirty miles away from the rest of me. I can see it floating there, pale and useless, as if it belongs to someone else. My body is no longer mine. It is just something the stream is using, rolling and battering and washing clean of whatever I used to be.
Time loses its edges.
I don’t know how long I have been under. The roar in my ears is the only constant. It drowns out thought. It drowns out everything except the next rock, the next bite, the next helpless spin.
Then, without ceremony, the river spits me out.
I wash up on a gravel bank, gasping, coughing, cheek pressed into wet stones. My body is a map of bruises. My hand is still thirty miles away. The water keeps moving beside me, innocent now, as if it didn’t just try to erase me.
When I finally reached the bank, the stream looked exactly as it had when I entered it.
The water glittered. A bird was singing.
The river had not changed.
Only my understanding of it had.
