It is quiet on the deck tonight.
The ropes give their soft old sighs, and somewhere across the river a bell rings – calling no one, meaning nothing, except that life rolls on.
I sit barefoot on the bench, feeling the hum of the boat – my boat, my small floating world – steady beneath me.
There is no hurry now.
No storm to outrun.
No story left that needs fixing.
I think of all the people who once stood here with me.
Their laughter, their tears. The way we tried.
The way we failed, sometimes beautifully.
And the way we loved, in our flawed, earnest ways.
And in this hush by the river that winds its way out to the west.
There’s a tender echo of all those days with her too.
The hopes we built, the quiet ways we grew up together over all those decades.
A small ache, but a grateful one, folded into the dusk.
Inside, someone sleeps, breathing evenly, trusting the night.
I think of my children, my far-flung friends, my own mother long gone – the bright arc of life stretching out like lanterns across the water.
I marvel at how far I’ve come.
At how close I am to myself now.
Maybe that’s the quiet miracle of this season. That the wild, hungry parts of me and the steady, tender ones have stopped tugging me in opposite directions. Now they just sit here together, like old friends sharing a glass of French red by the river.
“I wish I was a fisherman
Tumblin’ on the seas
Far away from dry land
And its bitter memories…”
The old song rolls up from somewhere deep.
I half-sing it into the dark.
Because it’s true – I am that fisherman.
Tumbling on my own small sea, far from old griefs.
Casting out my line with something like love.
I close my eyes.
Feel the cradle of the boat, the slow pulse of the river, the steady thrum in my chest.
For a moment it’s all one – river, boat, breath, life.
Everywhere at once.
“…No ceiling bearing down on me
Save the starry sky above.”
And I remember:
“The river is everywhere at once –
at the source and at the mouth,
in the waterfall, at the ferry, in the ocean and in the mountains –
everywhere.
And the present only exists for it,
not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future.”
I smile.
Let the old pain slip from my shoulders.
And let my own small river carry me
at last
home.