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From one moment to the next, my friends decided to take a different route to return home after school. From one moment to the next, I started to walk near a creek almost every day. Sometimes, with them, and many times alone.
As far as I know, it once was a river, a big one, and from what I have heard, a really beautiful one. But of that river, only this creek remains, which has somehow managed to make its way out of that apartment complex.
From the very first moment, that small river caught my attention. Every time I walk beside the shore, I can't stop looking at it. There is something mystical and majestic about it that I can't explain. But strangely, there is also something nostalgic about how the current sounds when it hits the rocks or flows quietly. Its beauty makes me walk here again and again.
However, beyond its strange beauty and the tranquility that it transmits to me deeply, there is another reason why I always take this way home, one that I can’t even understand myself. Sometimes, many times actually, I feel I can hear the river.
I don’t just hear its quiet current or the small waves splashing on the rocks. Sometimes, I think I can hear the river trying to tell me something. Something that I simply can’t understand no matter how much I focus my attention on it whenever I pass by there.
Because of this, sometimes, or rather always, I think I have lost my mind. A river can’t tell me anything, but I always feel that the river tells me many things. I always sense that the river knows many things.
Only once I tried to tell this to one of my friends. In the most ordinary way possible, I tried telling her that maybe the river was talking to me, but that worried and confused look on her face was all I needed to never say anything to anyone about this again. Nobody believes me, not even I believe me.
Somehow, it is just me and it. The creek, which I cling to call river, and me, a girl who swears that the creek she calls river speaks to her.
Even though it possibly cost my sanity, I still walk by the river almost daily. I try to understand what it is telling me, but the rational part of me stops me from getting too far into it. Until one day when I inexplicably felt what the river was telling me. It wasn’t words. What I was able to understand is far from a complete sentence.
“Want you to hold me.” I think that’s what the river could have told me.
Or maybe I just wanted to do it.
At first, I just submerged my feet in the creek. I didn’t dare to do more. Also, I didn’t know exactly how to hug a river either.
Then, little by little, day by day, I slowly progressed. After my feet, I submerged my legs, after my legs, I submerged my torso, and after my torso, I was already floating in the shallow creek.
I hug it almost daily, or so I do if this counts as a hug. Almost daily, I submerge myself in the river and feel how the flow goes on its way, flowing over my face, over my ears, once over my lips. I only close my eyes as the river continues to be a river around me.
One of those days when I was feeling particularly out of mind, I felt the strange urge to completely submerge myself in the river. And that is what I did.
And then, I was submerged, holding my breath, feeling the river, as always.
Trying with all my might to understand something new. But the river doesn’t tell me anything anymore.
And so, suddenly, I felt the overwhelming need to breathe.
Not for lack of air, I could still hold my breath for another minute more.
Something in me wanted to drown in this mystical water.
And that is what I did.
It was painful, but it felt good. I didn’t stop.
As the water filled my lungs, I felt the river say something to me again after a long time. I think that it didn’t want me to drown.
I tried to force myself to surface, just as it seemed to want me to, but my urge was stronger.
Someone stopped me.
Abruptly, I was pulled out of the river by one of the dwellers of the apartment complex. He was furious and was yelling at me, but I didn’t hear him. I was scared, confused and frustrated. All I could do was cough, with the yells in the background, with the current flowing indifferently.
Anyway, from the dweller's shouts, the only thing I was able to understand was that he forbade me to return to this river. I was no longer allowed to take this route. The thought shattered me.
I didn’t argue to keep anyone else from finding out about this. This matter was only the business of the river, which was actually a creek, and mine, a girl who was crazy enough to be happily willing to drown herself in a river.
Now, I take another route to return home. I no longer pass by the river.
That river which was so beautiful and mystical. That river which told me things that I couldn’t understand. That river which wanted to be hugged, or that I wanted to hug. That river which knew things that were buried deep in my soul.
The reason why I returned there over and over again, why I felt it spoke to me, why I felt complete when I submerged myself, why I wanted to drown in it.
I didn’t know why, but the river did. It definitely does.
Yes, the river knows