Observation #4, 10/9: Disappear

(Theme: Erasure)

We used to go down to the river all the time, the bend where the water goes still and quiet but the current is too fast to breed mosquitoes. To the low and crooked tree, the one that spills its branches out over the water, the motion of it shivering the leaves like mute windchimes.  The bank is populated only with smooth, round stones ground down by thousands of years of lazy water. Nestled against those cool stones, in the shadow of the crooked tree, used to be our Kingdom.

You departed for other shores, and I grew a full foot and a half, and you only came back when your hair was long and wild again, like before your mother lopped it off with kitchen shears.

You came back and I went to the river, knowing I would find you there. I waited for hours. Only when the light turned October orange against the river and set the crooked tree on fire did you appear.

“Still down by the water?”

“I’ve been waiting.”

“After all this time?”

“I knew you would come.”

It was easy, talking to you again. You were smiling the way I remembered, but something was strange in it. You had the same freckles, the same glass-colored eyes, the same unkempt mane. You were barefoot, and you set your toes just at the edge of the water. Your difference eluded me.

“It’s different,” you tell me, watching the water move by your feet. “The city.”

“But you like it, don’t you?”

“Yes.” You pluck a yellowing leaf from our tree and turn it back and forth over your long fingers.

“You like going to School.”

“Yes,” you smile then. “But School isn’t the City. The City never sleeps. The noise and grit of it works under your skin and lodges there.”

You have destroyed the yellow leaf by accident and it slips through your hands, landing on the surface of the river and vanishing downstream. And that is the difference. I say your name.

“You’re disappearing.”

“Yes,” you hold up a hand, an arm, in front of your face and I can see the bend in the river through its transparency. “Yes,” you turn it slowly, a piece of glass distorting the world. But then you raise your arms over your head and the October sun hits you and you are –

“But I am full of light.”