The Wound

The torrent spends itself in a single night. By morning, it is already legend – the year the valley drowned, the hour the bridges broke. The riverbed remains. You ache to be the torrent, the violence everyone remembers. But water forgets itself with every mile. It reaches the sea and leaves nothing behind but the path it wore through stone. Your edges loosen, grain by grain, given to the current. The river doesn't ask what you want to keep. Over centuries, stone surrenders into passage. The riverbed is the scar the water left, and now the river has somewhere to go.

The Path

You dream of being the deluge. But the valley was carved by what endured, not what overwhelmed. You imagined yourself as spectacle: the single act that rewrites everything. But the map was drawn by acts content enough to be forgotten. You feel yourself thinning – grain by grain, carried downstream. This is how the river deepens you: not by filling, but by taking away. A swamp hoards its water and chokes. A flood spends itself in spectacle and is forgotten by morning. A river gives itself grain by grain, and finds what neither swamp nor flood ever could: the sea.

The Shadow

His daughter was swept away once. The Guardian's hand closed on nothing where her hand had been and surfaced alone. She was found a mile downstream, breathing, pulled out by strangers he would never meet. But his body still remembers the tumbling, hands grasping and missing. Now he dams and holds his children close as the water pools behind him, still and deep. He stands at the edge each morning, watching for ripples, mistaking stillness for safety. His daughter is the first to leave. Before the door closes, she says: I need to go somewhere. I need to arrive. He does not understand. He taught them safety. He never taught them to swim. He dies with his hands still raised against a current that stopped flowing decades ago. His children visit the grave. They do not stay long. There is somewhere they need to be. ❖ The Boundless swore she would hold nothing. She watched her father dam his whole life – watched the water go green and still, watched her mother drink from it anyway. She tears down her own banks. The first flood is ecstasy – she is everywhere, touching every root, every cracked place. Neighbours who never knew her name know it now; she is finally seen. But a river without banks is a river that cannot be found twice. The daughter who needed her in April cannot find her in May – she has moved on, downstream, feeding someone else's field. The roots she woke in spring have no water by summer. She is always somewhere else – giving everywhere, arriving nowhere. She evaporates – shallow and scattered, too thin to ever reach the sea.

The Cut