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.

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.

He rarely looked to the future, and to the past even less, but gathered up the current moment in both hands to admire its particulars, with no apology and no sense it should be otherwise.

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. If he had told me this then, I wouldn’t have had the ability to believe him. But time pulls our strings.

How does one live for seventeen years without ever considering whether she is known? The idea had not previously occurred to me, that someone could see into the heart of things and there you’d be. I stood on the dusty flophouse steps feeling transparent, held up to the light in a way I never imagined before meeting Wilson Moon.

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.

God will take a life, God will give a life, and God will make a life unrecognizable. God won’t warn you what’s coming next.

Making love to Wil felt like arriving somewhere I had been crawling to get to for a very long time. In his arms, I became all the things it had never occurred to me to be before we met. I was beautiful and desirable and even a little dangerous. I was away from the farm overnight, a woman making choices and taking risks rather than an obedient and timid girl.

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

My mother named the colt Abel right then and there, telling Daddy that Adam himself couldn’t have looked upon his child with more awe.

Just as a single rainstorm can erode the banks and change the course of a river, so can a single circumstance of a girl’s life erase who she was before.

A force larger than myself moved me forward, from primal hunger to that initial curious creep out of my bedroom and down the stairs, to eventual regularity and the assumption of my mother’s role as caretaker of the family. I did not choose so much as succumb to necessity.

But I soon realized that even more important than planting seeds or digging the latrine or establishing my routine of daily living, I needed to quiet my mind. Worry and fear would not change the outcome of my situation or my fate. Horizon might not be home, but I found a way to stay.

As I drifted off to sleep in my new forest home, woven in some great and mysterious tapestry, the only sound I listened for was the steady pulse of the vast collection of beating hearts, the inhale and exhale of a million lives being lived alongside mine. I realized I had never been less afraid in my life.

The hours I spent sitting in the meadow or strolling the woods, immersed in my own observations and thoughts, felt less awkward and idle and more vital by the day.

wanted to save him from himself and balance out all the bad in him, all the bad in the whole world, by being good. I wanted to tell him there had been more inside me than I’d ever thought possible, and, maybe, there was more inside him too.

Sometimes a woman splits in two. Sometimes a woman is a public self who sits rigid on a bench with proper dignity and acceptance as someone she deeply loves walks away, while simultaneously her private self is shrieking and chasing and grasping and tackling and begging that love to stay.

I shook my head. “It’s not. Women endure. That’s what we do.” “That’s nonsense,” she replied more harshly than I expected. “A woman is more than a vessel meant to carry babies and grief.”

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.