The Destined Path of Water Chapter 22: Chapter 22: Without

Read chapter 22 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Rika | Age 17 The ceiling had not changed. Bird stain in the corner, body too round, wings uneven. Companion shape near the window, fish in the morning and leaf in the evening. Eight years of looking at this ceiling and it was exactly as it had always been, which was something I appreciated about it the reliability of it, the way it asked nothing and changed nothing and was simply there whenever I needed something to look at while I was thinking. I had been doing a lot of looking at it lately. The hollow feeling had a new shape. That was the only way I could describe it to myself, in the weeks after the dam was cancelled and the river ran full and the village had its quiet celebration and everything was fine. The hollow feeling I had carried since I was nine years old had always been present, had changed over the years, had been different these past weeks in a way I had not been able to name and now it was different again. Larger. More specific. Like it had found the exact outline of what was missing and had settled into that outline and was not going to be vague about it anymore, even though I still could not see the shape clearly enough to name it. Something was gone. I knew that the way I knew things that came from below thinking. Not as information, not as something I could point to, just as a fact my body had accepted before my mind caught up. I touched my collarbone every morning when I woke up. I did not know why. It was not something I decided to do. My hand just went there, every morning, first thing, the way hands go to familiar things, and found bare skin and stayed there for a moment before I got up. I had worn a necklace for eight years. Black thread, blue bead, the colour of river water when you look straight down and the bottom is too far to see. I did not remember losing it. I did not remember taking it off. It was simply gone in the same way the last few hours of that evening were gone present until they weren't, no transition, no memory of the crossing. Riya noticed I was not wearing it. She did not say anything for two weeks and then one morning at the corner of the lane she looked at my collarbone and said, "Your necklace." "I know," I said. She looked at my face. "Are you alright." I thought about how to answer that honestly. "I don't know what I lost," I said. "But I lost something." She walked beside me for a moment without speaking, which was one of the things I had always valued about her, that she did not fill silence with reassurance when reassurance was not what was needed. "The river is full again," she said finally. Not as a consolation. Just as a fact, offered carefully. "I know," I said. "I'm glad about it." "But." "But nothing. Both things are true." She nodded. She understood both things being true. That was another thing I valued about her. I went to the river in the evenings sometimes. Not the flat stones there were flat stones near my village too, closer, a place I had been going for two years when I needed to press my hand to the water and feel what was happening in it. I went there now and sat and the water was cold and fast and full and completely alive under my palm, nothing tired in it, nothing diminished, the current pushing back against my hand the way a healthy thing pushes back. I was glad about it. Genuinely, uncomplicatedly glad. And underneath the gladness, the hollow feeling, specific now in a way it had never been specific before. Not the old vague pointing direction, not the warmth of the necklace leading somewhere, just the shape of something gone, the outline of an absence I could almost see if I looked at it sideways. I drew the dragon one more time. Not in a notebook margin, not on condensation on a glass. Properly, in my sketchbook, on a full page. Scales and curves and that long unhurried body, the shape of something too large to fit but I fit it anyway, from memory, and when I was done I looked at it for a long time. I felt something when I looked at it. Not memory exa