THE RIVER AND THE BED IT LAY ON
When I was little, the river was magic. Thatâs what I called it. Magic.
It ran behind the schoolyard, wide and loud and silver, breaking sunlight into pieces. I used to stop on the bridge every morning just to watch it move. Sometimes there were fish. Sometimes branches. Once, a whole couch floated past and everyone talked about it for weeks.
The river made everything feel alive. Even the ugly parts of town looked softer beside it.
Back then, everything was enormous to me. Rainstorms. Dogs. Streetlights. The moon. Wonder came easy when I was young enough to believe the world was trying to impress me.
But eventually, the river became background noise. Thatâs how adulthood starts, I think. Not with heartbreak. Not with taxes. Not with funerals. It starts the first time you stop looking at something beautiful because you assume it will always be there.
By high school, I crossed the bridge without slowing down. Headphones in. Eyes low. Late for somewhere. Late for everything.
One spring, some exchange students came to town. I remember them standing by the railing, leaning dangerously far over the edge, laughing like they had discovered treasure. âDo you SEE this?â one of them asked me. And I remember shrugging. âItâs just the river.â
I wish I had known that those would become the stupidest words I ever said aloud.
I moved away at twenty three. The city I ended up in had buildings taller than memory. Everything there glittered. Everything begged to be noticed. And somehow, none of it meant anything to me.
Years later, I came home to visit my mother. She told me casually, while washing dishes, that they were planning to redirect the river. âConnect the neighborhoods,â she said. âHelp traffic.â As if they were discussing weather. As if they werenât preparing to remove the spine from my childhood.
I called out of work for three days. Then five. Then more.
Every morning, I sat by the river again. Really sat there. No phone. No music. No distractions. Just water moving endlessly forward, as if time had chosen a physical form.
I watched sunlight fracture across the surface. Watched leaves spiral through currents. Watched strangers pass by without looking down.
And suddenly, I understood something terrible: the river had never stopped being beautiful. I had simply stopped seeing it.
That is the cruelest thing growing up steals from you. Recognition.
The ability to understand that something is miraculous before it becomes memory.
I thought there would be closure. Demolition crews. Warning signs. A final day. But existence is rarely dramatic enough to announce its endings properly.
The next time I came home, the river was gone. Not dying. Not shrinking. Gone.
The riverbed looked obscene exposed like that. Like seeing bones where flesh should be.
I stood on the old bridge staring down into absence, trying to calculate how many chances I had wasted.
What if I had stopped longer as a teenager? What if I had brought friends there? What if I had fallen in love beside it? What if I had thanked it somehow? What if I had understood sooner that permanence is not the same thing as immortality?
My mother says they made progress. Connected the neighborhoods. Reduced traffic. Improved efficiency.
But sometimes I think modern life is just a long process of excavating every beautiful thing for parts.
And now, years later, I still dream about the river.
Not because it was extraordinary. Because it wasnât.
But because it was ordinary for so long that I forgot ordinary things can disappear too.
