The Destined Path of Water Chapter 21: Chapter 21: Without

Read chapter 21 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Sae | Age 17 I kept going to the river. Not because I decided to. Just because my feet knew the path the way feet know paths they have taken enough times, and in the weeks after the dam was cancelled I found myself there often, at the flat stones near the wide bend, sometimes in the afternoon and sometimes in the evening and once very early in the morning when the mist was still sitting in the valley and the hills were shapes rather than things. I did not know what I was doing there. That was the honest answer and it bothered me in the low persistent way that unanswered questions bother you, not urgently, just always present, a stone in a shoe. I had been going to this river for two years with a purpose tracking the changes, monitoring the flow, documenting for the objection letters. The purpose was gone now. The river was full and fast and the dam was cancelled and there was nothing left to document. And yet I kept going. I would sit on the flat stones and look at the water and wait for something I could not name and the something would not arrive and I would go home. My neck felt bare. I had noticed it the morning after, the morning I had woken up with wet clothes and no memory of how I got there. I had reached for the necklace the way I had reached for it every morning for seven years and found nothing and assumed I had taken it off somewhere and not remembered and looked for it without finding it. I had looked for three days before accepting that it was gone. I did not know where. I did not remember losing it. I missed it more than made sense for a piece of thread and a bead. It was not just the object. It was the warmth of it, the way it had always been warmer than it should have been, the feeling of it between my fingers when I needed something to hold. It was the seven years of it against my skin, the thing I had carried since I was ten years old that I could not explain and had stopped trying to explain and had simply accepted as part of what I was. Gone. Without explanation. Without memory of the going. Arjun asked me once, in the weeks after, if I was alright. We were walking back from school and he had been looking at me sideways for most of the walk in the way he did when he was working up to something. I said I was fine. He said I seemed like someone who had lost something. I said I had lost my necklace. He said he did not mean the necklace. I looked at him. He looked back with the expression of someone who does not have more information than you but is certain that you do. I looked away. At the hills. At the road. At the river visible in the gap between the houses as we walked. "I don't know what I lost," I said. "That's the problem." He nodded like that made sense, which I appreciated because it did not fully make sense and we both knew it. I went to the flat stones that afternoon. The river was running the way it had been running since the night I woke up on the bank full and fast and loud, the sound of it filling the valley, the white at the edges where it moved fastest bright in the autumn light. It was a good river. A healthy river. The water was clear in a way it had not been in years and the stones of the riverbed were visible through it and the current was strong and purposeful. I sat on my stone and looked at it for a long time. There was another stone beside mine. Flat, a good sitting stone, slightly lower than the one I always took. I had been aware of it, in the weeks of coming here, in a way I could not fully account for. Not that anything was wrong with it. Just that it felt empty. In the way a chair feels empty at a table when someone is missing, not because chairs are usually full, but because something about the particular arrangement makes the absence specific. I looked at the empty stone. I looked at the river. I reached for my collarbone and found bare skin and held my hand there for a moment anyway. The hollow feeling was large today. It was always large but today it was very present, that gr