What the River Remembers

Water has no memory, the saying goes—each molecule slips downstream and forgets the stone it once clung to, the bed it carved for centuries.

Yet the river knows. Its voice carries the accumulation of a thousand tributaries, each story folded into the current: the mountain's slow collapse, the forest's annual shedding, the clay's quiet dissolution.

The banks lean in like witnesses, scarred with the arithmetic of floods, holding fast to what the water cannot keep—the weight of passing, the mathematics of erosion.

And I stand at the edge, my reflection scattered across rapids, wondering what I carry that I've forgotten, what rivers I contain that flow so silently I mistake the current for stillness.