The Wound

The torrent spends itself in a night. By morning, it is already story – the year the valley drowned, the hour the bridges broke. The riverbed remains. You watch the water's violence and want to be the force everyone remembers. But the water forgets itself with every mile. It reaches the sea leaving nothing behind but the path it wore through you. You feel yourself loosening – grain by grain, surrendered to the current. The river doesn't ask what you want to keep. Over centuries, stone becomes passage. The bed is what the water left behind – and now the river has somewhere to go.

The Path

They remember the deluge. They forget what carved the valley – the patient centuries, the stone that yielded. You imagined service as spectacle: the single act that rewrites everything. But the map was drawn by acts patient enough to be forgotten. This is how the river deepens you. You feel the silt of yourself carried downstream. This is how the river deepens you – not once, in a flood of self-emptying, but grain by grain, across the quiet years. A flood spends its fury in a single night. By noon, it's forgotten. A river spends itself mile by mile, until it finds what neither swamp nor flood ever could: the sea.

The Shadow

His daughter was swept away once. His hand closed on nothing where his daughter's had been, as he surfaced alone. She was found a mile downstream, breathing, pulled out by strangers he would never meet. But his body still remembers the tumbling, the hand that grasped and missed. Now he dams. He holds his children close, so close. 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. She is sixteen. She says: I need to go somewhere, Dad. 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. He swore he would hold nothing. He watched his father dam his whole life – watched the water go green and still, watched his mother drink from it anyway. He tears down his own banks. The first flood is ecstasy – he is everywhere, touching every root, every cracked place that ever thirsted. Neighbours who never knew his name know it now. He is finally seen. But a river without banks is a river that cannot be found twice. His son needed him in April. He had moved on, downstream, feeding someone else's field. The son who needed him in April cannot find him in May – he has moved on, downstream, feeding someone else's field. The roots he woke in spring have no water by summer. He is always somewhere else – giving everywhere, arriving nowhere. He dies shallow and spread too thin, too scattered to reach the sea.

The Cut