Go as a River

by Shelley Read

If this makes you wonder whether the joys and pain of a place wash away as the floodwaters rise and swallow, I can tell you they do not. The landscapes of our youths create us, and we carry them within us, storied by all they gave and stole, in who we become.

that 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 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.

By showing on the surface only a small fraction of her interior, a woman gave men less to plunder.

I doubt that Mother would have helped me had she been alive. 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.

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.

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.

for every ounce of good in this world, two ounces of bad outweigh it. You

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.