The River Still Knows Our Names

Somewhere beyond the reach of calendars, a river keeps the secrets we were too young to recognize as sacred.

Its waters, ancient and indiscreet, still carry the silhouettes of two wanderers who once mistook the kindness of an afternoon for the permanence of heaven.

I wonder—

does the earth remember the pilgrimage of your footsteps? Those impossible miles your innocence surrendered to the uncertain altar of my company?

Does the hillside still cradle the echoes of our unremarkable conversations, or has the wind, that restless archivist of forgotten things, already scattered them among the bones of yesterday?

We possessed no kingdoms then.

Only borrowed hours, a poverty unashamed of its nakedness, and the extravagant wealth of having nowhere else we wished to be.

We sat beneath the architecture of trees, speaking of everything as though the universe had entrusted us with its unfinished manuscript.

How little we understood of the violence concealed within time.

For time does not always arrive with the appetite of a thief.

Sometimes it comes as a gardener, gently transplanting people into seasons where their roots can no longer intertwine.

And what remains is neither flower nor grave—

only the strange fertility of a place where something beautiful once dared to grow.

The river, I imagine, has forgiven our absence.

Yet on certain evenings, when the earth grows quiet enough to hear its own remembering,

I wonder whether the water still bends around the shape of two names it never learned to pronounce apart.