The Arrival

  I came to on the riverbank like something the current had finally finished with.

  Not thrown, but placed. The way water sets a stone down when it is done carrying it. I don't know how long I lay there before my lungs remembered they were mine. It could have been a single breath. It could have been eternity. Neither felt wrong here.

  When I finally opened my eyes, the first thing I noticed was what wasn't there. No thickness in my chest. No weight pulling at the edges of my vision. I hadn't felt this clean in — I couldn't remember how long. That should have frightened me, the not remembering. It didn't.

  I sat up slowly. My hands found a stone beneath me, smooth and warm, and I held onto it. Not because I needed the support, but because my fingers hadn't learned yet that the water was done with me. They were still gripping, still bracing for a current that was no longer there.

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  The river was still before me. But it was not the river I remembered. This one didn't roar. It didn't pull. It moved the way breath moves in a sleeping chest — in, out, patient, without effort. I could feel it in my own ribs, not separate from me, but not entirely me either. Not yet.

  Somewhere nearby — close, the way warmth is close — I felt someone.

  A presence. Not a sound, not a shape. Just the unmistakable sense of someone being there, waiting. I knew who it was. I knew it the way you know where your own arm is in the dark. My wife was there, waiting for me to surface. I never take her on dives with me — I know better. When I do, I forget why I went. I forget the work. I forget everything except her, and we come home with nothing.

  So why was she here?

  I didn't turn to look. I wasn't ready. Because as I sat there, something began to surface in me — not a thought, but a tide. Thick, dense, waterlogged pieces of a memory that didn't belong to the lightness of me. The weight of it. The stone. The forgetting.

  I sat on the warm bank, and I let the memory come.