Go as a River

by Shelley Read

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.

Then he stood and eyed me so long I thought I’d melt like chocolate in the last rays of sun reaching low across the porch.

I wanted more of him, like a craving for sunshine hidden too long behind the clouds.

I, like women throughout the ages, knew the value of employing silence as a guard dog to her truth.

I was a girl alone in a house of men, quickly becoming a woman. It was like blossoming in a bank of snow.

But the one benefit of having a dead mother is the ability to turn her into an unwavering ally, whether she would have been one or not.

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

A human being can only hold so much.

There was beauty to this chaos. Every piece of life here had its role in the eternal business of living. I felt small and unnecessary but not entirely unwelcome.

Sorrow tried but did not claim me.

Falling in love with Wilson Moon had been the most honest act of my life. 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.

He was a slowly melting icicle and I a patient stream.

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

I was wise enough to know only one thing: the land would decide my fate.

That length of the great river told my story. I felt equal parts love and anguish for its winding path, and awe that it had followed me here.

I first learned to trust the hours instead of fill them.

The new land had chosen to keep me, and I responded with every bit of determination and care that this honor deserved.

“A woman is more than a vessel meant to carry babies and grief.”

“Loss has nothing to do with what you deserve or don’t deserve, for God’s sake.”

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.

what I had learned most about becoming is that it takes time.

For, like the river, I had also gathered along the way all the tiny pieces connecting me to everything else, and doing this had delivered me here, with two fists of forest soil in my palms and a heart still learning to be unafraid of itself. I had been shaped by my kindred—my lost family and lost love; my found friendships, though few; my trees that kept on living and every tree that gave me shelter; every creature I met along the way, every raindrop and snowflake choosing my shoulder, and every breeze that shifted the air; every winding path beneath my feet, every place I laid my hands and head, and every creek like the one before me, rolling off the hillside, gaining strength in gravity, spinning through the next eddy, pushing around the next bend, taking and giving in quiet agreement with every living thing.