Go as a River

by Shelley Read

He would teach me how true a life emptied of all but its essentials could feel and that, when you got down to it, not much mattered outside the determination to go on living.

But it is often the small fateful twist that alters our lives most profoundly—the

“I’ll go as a river,” said Wil. “My grandfather always told me that it’s the only way.”

wake of his delivery but overwhelmingly grateful—for his breath, for my milk, to be on the other side of his frightening arrival,

The unforeseen ripple effects of an honest act do not make the choice less truthful. All one can do, I had learned from Wil, is to meet those ripples—as unimaginable or horrific or beautiful or desperate as they may be—with the best you had.

I never stopped questioning the choices of my past, but in the known world, each step surely unfurls the next, and we must walk into that open space, mapless and without invitation.

Right or wrong, my next step lay before me, and I tried my best to trust it.

I wondered at the limits of progress and if we’d ever know when we hit them.

“but everyone is from somewhere or a mixture of something, half this, half that.

I had lived my life willing to face what came to me, and that I’d always tried to do the next right thing.

they were like many families, their lives together a weave of sad and complex and happy and sweet and tragic all at once.