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.

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.

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.