Go as a River

by Shelley Read

Try as we might to convince ourselves otherwise, the moments of our becoming cannot be carefully plucked like the ripest and most satisfying peach from the bough. In the endless stumble toward ourselves, we harvest the crop we are given.

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

So I kept on, day by day, and gradually I began to relax, yielding my dread to some level of trust.

Horizon might not be home, but I found a way to stay.

I took the time to wonder at the world—the total silence of a trotting fox, the perfect symmetry of a beaver lodge, how butterflies arrived like a toss of colorful confetti just as the first tiny blossoms of nectar unfurled, the daily parade of sandhill cranes migrating overhead who knew exactly where to go.

Delicate happiness pushed through the mud of grief just as surely as the summer forest blossomed from winter.

we stared at each other a long while like two souls reconnected after being a universe apart.

There is a kind of sadness that transcends sadness, that runs like hot syrup into every crevice of your being, beginning in the heart then oozing into your very cells and bloodstream, so that nothing—not earth or sky or even your own palm—ever looks the same. This is the sadness that changes everything.

“Go as a river,” I whispered to her, as Wil might have done, and, I swear, I felt her spirit rise.

I knew what was missing, but I was also appreciative of what was there.

Strength, I had learned, was like this littered forest floor, built of small triumphs and infinite blunders, sunny hours followed by sudden storms that tore it all down. We are one and all alike if for no other reason than the excruciating and beautiful way we grow piece by unpredictable piece, falling, pushing from the debris, rising again, and hoping for the best.