There’s a river I go to. I stand and I watch, wondering, the warming sun holding me, saying, oh, the eternity of your days, your tortured heart, the hardest heart of all. I look to the dark pool of water and it frightens me. A river pool. The uncertainty of its darkness; its imagined depth, and yet, I’m drawn to it, looking for what? Why? These dark waters reaching to the desperation of my thoughts here in the middle of where? A nowhere meant for what? And it seems to me, I’d jump into these dark waters, under these forever skies, if I could just see my way to not trusting myself, but I do still, at least, to the very end of what that means to me, I do, and it calls again from the depth of its dark waters, a voice that is not a voice sounding and resounding within me, saying: Come, swim, in me. I am water. And I think, even this dark pool of water is frightened of its own self, I can see it in its reaction. A thrill is just a thrill and need not be anything more. Is that true? I wonder, and I think of that story, the one everyone knows, of that girl–she she was just thirty-nine with a flash of rust-colored hair, who jumped into this river pool of dark water, never to be seen again. Her story stayed with me. Is it her voice I hear calling to me? Of course, it is, her clutched fingers reaching. Why? Does she see the same desperation within me? To jump? To swim? In dark water? My sorrow? Is that what she sees? And I hear her, half-winking, telling me life can be again the goodness of an unfaltering self, safe and promising, and she dances; water dancing to the unseen rhythm of a certain sadness, the kind bred from never being freed of a remembered desire; never again free to walk in this life.

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Is she there now? Listening? Watching? Seeing? Trapped as she is, in these dark waters, the eternity of her yesterdays. The once-tallness of her now bent and twisted to the unknowing of everything beyond her dark water? Why’d she do it? “A wicked flu.” And then, “My love.”  Who’s she saying this to? Me? Or is it just another thought surfacing from the depth of what once was? Come, and never mind that, she says, come now to the slow comforting movement of my dark water. A place to hide; a place to trick yourself from the world, not just mine. Not just yours. And what am I to do? Jump? Should I? Like her? I look to the steady flowing river avoiding the dark pooling of water calling to me: Trust me.

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Can I? And I ask myself: What is real and what is imagined? And what of the others? The ones before? The ones now and the ones that shall come? All in need–wanting, of her dark water?

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You are not the only one, I say to the unseen her, a breeze picking up and carrying my words over the open spaces between us; beneath this warming sun; these forever skies, that I shall not forsake.