Go as a River

by Shelley Read

The landscapes of our youths create us, and we carry them within us, storied by all they gave and stole, in who we become.

But I’ve come to understand how the exceptional lurks beneath the ordinary, like the deep and mysterious world beneath the surface of the sea. “The way to everything,” I replied.

love is a private matter, to be nurtured, and even mourned, between two beings alone. It belongs to them and no one else, like a secret treasure, like a private poem.

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

But I came to understand that she, like I, like women throughout the ages, knew the value of employing silence as a guard dog to her truth. By showing on the surface only a small fraction of her interior, a woman gave men less to plunder.

I would step into the life of a mother. I would heed the call of necessity. I would rise.