Push-pull, push-pull, the cold sting of the water, the heavy crinkled cotton.
She drug her wrist across her forehead, and the river dripped down her brow and over the hollow in her cheek. When it touched her lips it tasted of the ocean, of Mother, her forty-nine sisters, and the cold sting.
Push-pull, push-pull. She wrung the garment out and held it to the sun. The light fought its way around each fold and crease, diving through the surfaces and slowly forcing the dampness out from its wefts.
It would eventually dry, dancing in that the breeze as it lifted off the river; but she would never dry. She would never warm. She would always be cold, all the way through.
Pebbles from the shore still clung to her knees as she rose, digging into her flesh. She kicked her way up to the small cabin, and they slowly came loose, dropping to the floor in little unnoticeable clatters, leaving her skin gnarled, imprinted and red.
She didn’t feel it. She hardly felt anything, not since she walked out from the water those many years ago.
You could say the river was lonely. You could say the river was ashamed, or guilty. You could say the river was a complicated person, but you wouldn’t be true. Because the river wasn’t a person at all. The river was a memory, a whisper of the sea, a creature belonging to endless time, never meant to feel or think or breathe. She was never supposed to exist, and we were never supposed to meet.
And I was never supposed to love her.
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