Memory of Water

Silence is not empty or immaterial, and it is not needed to chain tame things. It often guards powers strong enough to shatter everything.

But water doesn't care for human sorrows. It flows without slowing or quickening its pace in the darkness of the earth, where only stones will hear.

The world will not spin slower or faster when we have passed through the gate together. What remains is light on water, or a shifting shadow.

The story tells that water has a consciousness, that it carries in its memory everything that’s ever happened in this world, from the time before humans until this moment, which draws itself in its memory even as it passes.

We are children of water, and water is death’s close companion. The two cannot be separated from us, for we are made of the versatility of water and the closeness of death. They go together always, in the world and in us, and the time will come when our water runs dry.

Secrets carve us like water carves stone. On the surface nothing will shift, but things we cannot tell anyone chafe and consume us, and slowly our life settles around them, moulds itself into their shape. Secrets gnaw at the bonds between people. Sometimes we believe they can also build them: if we let another person into the silent space a secret has made within us, we are no longer alone there.

I have tried not to think about them, but their past-world bleeds into our present-world, into its sky, into its dust. Did the present-world, the world that is, ever bleed into theirs, the world that was? I imagine one of them standing by the river that is now a dry scar in our landscape, a woman who is not young or old, or perhaps a man, it doesn’t matter. Her hair is pale brown and she is looking into the water that rushes by, muddy perhaps, perhaps clear, and something that has not yet been is bleeding into her thoughts. I would like to think she turns around and goes home and does one thing differently that day because of what she has imagined, and again the day after, and the day after that. Yet I see another her, who turns away and doesn’t do anything differently, and I can’t tell which one of them is real and which one is a reflection in clear, still water, almost sharp enough to be mistaken for real. I look at the sky and I look at the light and I look at the shape of the earth, all the same as theirs, and yet not, and the bleeding never stops.

Of all silences I had encountered this was the gravest and most inevitable: not the silence of secrets, but of knowing.

Some things shouldn't be seen. Some things don't need to be said.

It's not worth thinking about them, Noria. They didn't think about us, either.

I would like to think she turns around and goes home and does one thing differently that day because of what she has imagined, and again the day after that, and the day after that.

The ceremony is over when there is no more water.

A circle only knows its own shape. If you ask where it begins and where it ends, it will stay silent, yet unbroken.

I looked back towards the city, at the dusty plain and the narrow thread of the sea on the horizon, radiant in the late-afternoon sun like the scale coat of a giant dragon disappearing slowly from sight.

It’s not them I think about,’ Sanja said. ‘Only their machines, what they knew and what they left to us.’ She stopped and placed her hand on my arm. I could feel the warm outline of her fingers through the fabric of my sleeve and the burn of the sun around it, two different kinds of heat next to each other. ‘It’s not worth thinking about them, Noria. They didn’t think about us, either.

the silent space around a secret is shattered, it cannot be made whole again. The

When the Ocean-Dragons roam, it means the world is changing,’ I said.