The River's Water (a short story by me)
I put my phone on silent and left it in the car for good measure. I needed peace, or at least some quiet.
My family had visited this lighthouse several times when I was younger. There was a collection of about half a dozen of them spread out across the next 50 miles of coastline. We used to pack soup in thermoses and then hop from one to the next, pretending that each was a different country. This one had been my favorite. Ireland. It was tucked into an especially green hillside, one that was steep and long. There was a drop-off to the icy water below about 100 yards past the lighthouse.
I walked to the edge of the plummeting cliffside, pausing to find my balance and swallow the remnants of the flask I was holding.
I briefly considered taking a moment to gather my thoughts. But there had been enough thinking already. Enough to last a lifetime. I simply chuckled in resignation and took the last few steps forward.
I felt a spray from the approaching waves beneath me, but then noticed it fade into a gentle splash on my cheek from a slow-moving creek that held my reflection as I stared down into it.
I looked up. No ocean, or hill. No lighthouse towering at my back. Just a peaceful scene, with an ivy thicket behind me and whispering leaves overhead. My ears caught on to the constant hum of the water weaving around smooth stones in the creekbed.
Heaven? Maybe I had miscalculated this one.
“Hi,” said a soft voice behind me. A woman in a large white tunic walked towards me. “I’ll show you where the pool is.”
She beckoned me to a path along the water’s edge. I hesitated, but there was quiet in my head and a feeling of rest in my chest where the anxiety usually paced. I followed her steps.
“I’m dead, yeah?” I asked. “What is this place?”
“Yes,” she said. “It was a long fall; you didn’t survive it. And this place, well, it’s not so much an afterlife as it is just a final box on the checklist.”
She paused and reached out a hand, helping me over a slick boulder. “Life for humans on earth, the essence of existing as an individual—it all comes from here. Or, it is here, rather. The energy, or spirit, that each person carries with them in the world comes from this great river,” she continued, gesturing to the widening creekbed that came into view as we rounded a corner. “But it isn’t yours to keep.”
“Why not? What does that mean?” I asked, stopping along the trail.
She stopped and turned back to me. “The universe gives you your spirit—your water—when you are born, but it must be returned at the end. It’s not yours to keep; it belongs to the river.”
“Who are you? Are you who God is supposed to be?”
“No, I’m not a god. I am simply the guardian of the water. I protects its path and journey. The ancient Picts were the native people of Scotland. They had a deity named Tava, who was the guardian of rivers. She granted safe passage across them. That’s my favorite one out of all the different ideas that humans have had about those watching over them. Think of me that way. I am your Tava. Everyone’s Tava.”
My mind had slowed on the trek, leaving me scrambling for another question.
“So what am I doing here?” I finally said.
Tava turned and began walking forward again, this time following the path deeper in the woods around us. “The river is a cycle. When the water of one person returns, it is mixed and refreshed with the rest of the water of the universe.”
“What water? What water are you talking about that I have?”
“It’s you,” she said. “Your identity, your behaviors, your beliefs, mannerisms, qualities, abilities, fears, and faults. The things you love and hate, your purpose and drive to exist. All the puzzle pieces that make up a mosaic of your life. The threads of your soul. Your water is who you are. But at the end of it all, each person must take what they have left and return it to the river. Right here.”
We stopped at a clearing occupied by a large pond.
“The pool of souls,” she explained.
I noticed a small wooden bowl on a level stone nearby. “That’s for me, isn’t it?” I asked quietly.
“Yes,” she responded. “It’s for the river.”
As I reached out and took the bowl, my brain floated back across her words. “What did you mean, ‘what they have left?’ People can lose their water?”
“Of course. That’s the point. The river keeps the world spinning, but life is more than just a water cycle. You have to believe that, or you’ll end up arriving here at the pool much earlier than you need to.”
I averted my eyes quickly, feeling the silence drift through the air between us. I finally looked up at Tava’s peaceful, smiling face as my heart sank. She didn’t know.
The air caught in my throat when I tried to speak. I coughed, and then asked, “So what do most people do with their water?”
She glanced up at the trees above us and laughed softly. “Sometimes not a whole lot, if I’m being honest. But the good ones try. They create and build and learn and teach and do their best to understand what it all means. They pour their heart and soul into the things they care about. Into people, especially. Their children, their friends, their students. They have love and they give it freely. They take the best pieces of themselves and give them to others. When they do that, even after they’re gone, who they were continues on in the lives they leave behind them. So if they did it right, in a way, they never really die.
“The best I can tell after all this time, with all these souls and all this water, is that the point was to take what the river gave you, no matter how bad it may seem, and do something with it that leaves the world and the people in it with more love and more hope than they would have had without you.”
It was quiet for a moment. The sound of the pond lapping onto the shore filled my head.
I went to the water’s edge, gripping the bowl tightly.
“That’s not what I did.” I stared down into the pond. One silent tear fell onto the soft white fabric of the shirt I was wearing. “My life—it’s really a blank sheet. I never touched the water. Never used it.”
Tava looked out across the pool. A sad smile crossed her face as tears of her own appeared.
Gently, she placed her hands over the top of the bowl. “Would you like to try it again?”
My chest tightened up as the implications of going back washed through my head. I wouldn’t be going back to anything good. Just my own mind, where I would try to sit with my thoughts without letting them drown me. I’d be going back to a battle. One that no one ever really wins. But it would be a battle that might teach me something. Something I could leave behind me when it was time—actually time—for me to go.
I glanced over my shoulder at the river behind us, and then looked down into my bowl. “Will I remember this? Any of it?” I asked.
“No,” Tava responded. “But I don’t think I told you much that you didn’t already know.”
When I looked up to the see the smile I could hear in her voice, I found myself looking out at an ocean. The moon shone on a grassy hill beneath my feet.
I shook my head clear of the fog that had come over my mind.
When I lifted the flask to take my final sip, I instead found a small wooden bowl in my hands. I peered at it through the darkness. Water. An angry confusion bubbled up inside me. Rage paralyzed me where I stood. I watched a single teardrop fall into the little cup.
After taking a few deep breaths, I slowly released the tension in my ribs. I turned and looked at the lighthouse behind me. There was a small patch of pink flowers springing out of the soil near the entrance. I trudged back up the hill and then sprinkled the small bit of water in the bowl over the blossoms.
Turning my back to the cliff, I returned to my car where I had left it on the highway’s edge. Upon glancing at my phone, I found four missed calls from my mom.
I sighed and redialed her number.
“Mara?” she answered. “Where’d you go? You left without saying anything right before everyone had their pie.”
“Just took a little trip out to one of the lighthouses we used to visit when I was little.”
I could sense her confusion over the line.
“Why’d you go there?” she asked.
I paused before responding, thinking back to the bowl I had found in my hands. “It’d been a while since I’d seen the water.”
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